J&" 


V 


THOMAS  HARDY 

An  Illustration  of  the 

PHILOSOPHY  OF  SCHOPENHAUER 


THESIS 


PRESENTED   TO   THE   FACULTY   OF  THE  GRADUATE  SCHOOL 

OF    THE    UNIVERSITY  OF  PENNSYLVANIA    IN   PARTIAL 

FULFILMENT  OF   THE  REQUIREMENTS  FOR  THE 

DEGREE    OF    DOCTOR    OF    PHILOSOPHY 

JUNE,  1909 


BY 

HELEN  GARWOOD 


PHILADELPHIA 
THE  JOHN  C.  WINSTON  CO. 
i9ii\ 


•   •  • « 


•••••••  t*  •  •     * 


CONTENTS, 


PAGE. 

I.    Use  of  Philosophy  in  Literature 5 

i.    The  General  Use  of  Philosophy  in  Literature. 
2.    The  Hardy  Use  of  Philosophy  in  Literature. 

II.    Establishment  of  Purposelessness 16 

i.    General  Establishment  of  Purposelessness. 

2.  Schopenhauer's   Establishment  of   Purposelessness. 

3.  Hardy's  Establishment  of  Purposelessness. 

4.  Similarity  of  the  Views  of  Schopenhauer  and  Hardy. 

III.  Effect  of  Purposelessness  :  Tragedy 41 

1.  Some  General  Views  of  Tragedy. 

2.  Schopenhauer's  Idea  of  Tragedy. 

3.  Hardy's  Use  of  Tragedy. 

4.  Similarity  of  the  Views  of  Schopenhauer  and  Hardy. 

IV.  Outcome  of  Purposelessness 69 

1.  General  Outcome. 

2.  The  Outcome  of  Schopenhauer. 

3.  The  Outcome  of  Hardy. 

4.  Lack  of  Similarity  of  the  Views  of  Schopenhauer  and  Hardy. 

V.    Artistic  Value  of  Purposelessness 83 


228301 


CHAPTER  I. 
Use  of  Philosophy  in  Literature. 

Much  has  been  written  of  Thomas  Hardy,  much  more 
will  be  said.  Great  men  are  not  disposed  of  in  a  few  volumes. 
To  couple  his  name  witr/  that  of  Schopenhauer  even  is  no 
longer  a  new  matter.  The  present  study  pretends  to  give  no 
final  word  of  criticism  and  no  comprehensive  appreciation.  It 
aims  to  be  one-sided  and  intensive.  It  is  a  search  into  the 
reason  why  The  Return  of  the  Native  or  Tests  or  The  Mayor 
of  Casterbridge  should  come  to  the  lips  as  an  illustration  of 
the  philosophy  of  The  World  as  Will  and  Idea.  How  much 
of  a  philosopher  Hardy,  the  writer,  is,  how  nearly  his  philos- 
ophy resembles  that  of  Schopenhauer,  how  it  has  affected  his 
work,  and  to  what  conclusions  it  has  brought  him  are  the 
questions  it  will  consider. 

To-day  scholars  are  contributing  articles  to  the  Modern 
Language  Association  publications  to  show  first,  that  the  Peart 
is  a  real  lament  of  a  real  father  over  a  lost  daughter,  second, 
that  the  poem  is  a  theological  dissertation  woven  about  a  straw 
child.  Will  the  Modern  Language  Association  writers  of  some 
distant  future  expend  their  strength  to  prove  that  Thomas 
Hardy  wrote  novels,  poems,  and  one  stupendous  drama  to  set 
forth  a  scheme  of  philosophy  he  had ;  or,  on  the  contrary,  that 
he  wrote  because  an  artist  must  write,  and  that  the  philosophy 
leaked  in  as  the  theology  leaked  into  the  Pearl,  because  the  air 
was  supersaturated  with  it.  One  is  tempted  to  press  the 
analogy  to  its  limits,  to  foreshadow  the  arguments  pro  and  con, 
and  to  suggest  that  the  decision  may  long  be  a  matter  of 
individual  preference.  Without  going  so  far,  however,  the 
inference  seems  clear  that  even  as  the  Middle  Ages  produced 
their  theological  literature,  their  Body  and  Soul  debates,  their 
Piers  Plowman  and  Pearl,  and  even  as  they  had  their  burning 
questions  of  predestination  and  free-will,  and  whether  men  are 
saved  by  grace  of  God  or  by  their  own  merits ;  so  to-day  we 
have  our  philosophical  literature,  and  our  burning  questions  of 

(5) 


optimism  and  pessimism,  of  whether  we  shall  extol  life  or 
endure  it. 

After  all,  what  could  be  more  natural?  Literature  must 
reflect  the  interests  of  its  time  or  lose  its  vitality.  There  are 
certainly  eternal  laws  of  beauty  which  cannot  be  evaded,  there 
are  just  as  certainly  eternal  laws  of  life  which  cannot  be 
neglected,  and  the  ever-insistent  problem  of  art  is  to  keep  these 
two  harnessed  together,  a  task  as  difficult  as  that  of  driving 
the  famous  chariot  of  Plato. 

Some  politics,  some  economics,  some  religious  unrest, 
some  philosophy  must  be  reflected  in  the  literature  of  to-day. 
If  the  abstruse  and  difficult  philosophical  systems  of  a  Kant, 
a  Fichte,  and  a  Hegel  could  profoundly  affect  a  Coleridge  and 
an  Emerson,  how  much  more  will  the  works  of  a  Schopenhauer, 
a  Nietzsche,  a  Von  Hartmann  affect  the  writing,  and  even  the 
reading  public!  For  the  one  person  who  can  enjoy  Kant's 
subtleties,  there  are  twenty  who  can  grasp  Nietzsche's  vagaries. 
Perhaps  we  have  grown  wiser,  perhaps  the  philosophers  speak 
more  clearly,  perhaps  the  great  spirits  are  no  longer  with  us. 
At  any  rate,  we  have  learned  to  regard  Mill  and  Huxley  and 
Spencer  and  the  three  Germans  and  others  of  the  hour  as  part 
of  our  necessary  stock-in-trade  for  culture  and  for  conversa- 
tion. A  few  years  ago  one  chatted  over  a  cup  of  tea  about 
William  James'  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  and  Will 
to  Believe  with  the  same  people  with  whom  one  had  exchanged 
pleasantries  about  Hugh  Wynne,  or  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward's 
latest  intricate  piece  of  womankind.  Now  we  give  one  breath 
to  The  Stooping  Lady,  another  to  wireless  telegraphy,  and 
turn  to  meet  Pragmatism  at  the  corner;  yes,  even  in  popular 
University  Extension  lectures.  Macaulay's  history  lay  on  my 
fine  lady's  dressing-table,  Pope's  "Essay  on  Man"  was  the  talk 
of  the  fashionable  world,  William  James  is  charged  with 
writing  novels  and  dubbing  them  Philosophies.  When  philos- 
ophy grows  as  interesting  as  a  novel,  how  can  the  novel,  which 
is  true  to  life,  help  reflecting  philosophy?  An  utterly  un- 
philosophical  literature  to-day  would  be  as  much  of  an  anomaly 
as  an  untheological  Milton. 

Mr.  Henry  Newbolt,  in  a  review  of  The  Dynasts,  in  the 
Quarterly  Review   for  January,    1909,   recognizes  this   new 


tendency.  "There  can  be  no  doubt,"  he  says,  "of  the  develop- 
ment wrought  by  modern  science  and  philosophy  in  human 
feeling,  or  rather  in  that  combination  of  thought  and  feeling 
which  determines  each  man's  view  of  the  world."  He  enforces 
his  observation  by  giving  the  following  quotations  from  Milton 
and  from  Laurence  Binyon  to  show,  not,  as  he  says,  the  merit 
of  either,  but  "the  simple  truth  that  philosophy  has  given  to 
Mr.  Binyon  an  opportunity  which  the  theology  of  the  seven- 
teenth century  could  not  offer  to  Milton." 

Paradise  Lost,  Book  VIII,  lines  261-271. 

"About  me  round  I  saw 
Hill,  dale,  and  shady  woods,  and  sunny  plains, 
*—   And  liquid  lapse  of  murmuring  streams ;  by  these, 
Creatures  that  lived  and  moved,  and  walked,  or  flew ; 
Birds  on  the  branches  warbling;  all  things  smiled; 
With  fragrance  and  with  joy  my  heart  o'erflowed. 
Myself  I  then  perused,  and  limb  by  limb 
Surveyed,  and  sometimes  went,  and  sometimes  ran 
With  supple  joints,  as  lively  vigour  led ; 
But  who  I  was,  or  where,  or  from  what  cause, 
Knew  not." 

Laurence  Binyon,  "Death  of  Adam." 
"On  my  opening  eyes 
The  splendour  of  the  world  shone  slowly  In, 
Mingling  its  radiant  colours  in  my  soul. 
Yea,  in  my  soul  and  only  in  my  soul 
I  deemed  them  to  abide ;  sky,  water,  trees, 
The  moving  shadow  and  the  tender  light, 
This  solid  earth,  this  wide  and  teeming  earth, 
Which  we  have  trodden,  weary,  step  by  step, 
Nor  found  beginning  of  an  end  of  it, 
I  deemed  it  all  abounding  in  my  brain ; 
The  murmur  of  the  waters  and  the  winds 
Seemed  but  a  music  sighing  from  my  joy, 
Then  I  arose,  and  ventured  forth  afoot ; 
And  soon,  how  soon,  was  dispossessed  of  all ! 
By  every  step  I  traveled  into  truth 


i 


8 

That  stripped  me  of  my  proud  dreams,  one  by  one, 

Till  all  were  taken.     On  such  faltering  feet 

By  gradual  but  most  certain  steps  I  came 

Into  my  real  and  perfect  solitude, 

Alone  amid  the  world  that  knew  not  me." 

It  is  not  surprising,  then,  to  find  Nietzsche  put  into  drama 
by  Bernard  Shaw,  to  hear  of  him  in  John  Davidson,  to  find 
traces  of  him  in  Ibsen,  Hauptmann,  Sudermann,  to  come  across 
echoes  of  the  Neo-Platonists  in  Maeterlinck's  Treasures  of  the 
Humble,  to  see  Spinoza  in  Bourget's  Le  Disciple,  one  phase 
of  Schopenhauer  in  Maeterlinck's  Life  of  the  Bee  and  Intelli- 
gence of  the  Flowers,  another  in  Guy  de  Maupassant's  "La 
Ficelle",  to  have  Browning's  "Instans  Tyrannus"  given  as  an 
illustration  of  a  point  in  Hegel,  or  Kant's  great  apostrophe  to 
Duty  compared  to  Wordsworth's  ode,  to  find  Zola's  U Assom- 
moir  and  La  Terre  mentioned  as  exemplifying  the  Schopen- 
hauerian  pessimism  and  Sturge  Moore's  poem,  "In  Centaur's 
Booty"  as  "subtly  presenting  all  that  is  poetically  valuable  in 
the  idea  of  the  Superman  as  now  current  among  us."  One 
stumbles  upon  so  many  allusions  to  philosophy  in  literature 
that  one  begins  to  feel  that  time  alone  is  needed  to  enable  one 
to  form  a  goodly  list  of  works  that  reflect,  whether  con- 
sciously or  unconsciously  matters  not,  some  phase  of  some 
philosopher. 

Nor  is  it  a  strange  development.  They  "be  of  one  blood", 
and  Philosophy  can  always  say  to  Literature,  as  Gray  Brother 
said  to  Mowgli :  "Thy  trail  is  my  trail,  thy  lair  is  my  lair, 
thy  kill  is  my  kill,  and  thy  death-fight  is  my  death-fight." 
Have  they  not  been  suckled  by  the  same  mother,  the  great 
mother,  Truth;  and,  though  one  may  go  upon  four  legs,  one 
upon  two,  are  not  the  traces  of  the  mother  in  both?  Those 
same  trifling  adverbs,  "whence"  and  "how" ;  that  little  "what", 
which  formed  the  riddle  of  the  universe  for  Thales,  still  com- 
pose the  riddle  for  Schopenhauer;  the  relation  of  man  to  the 
gods,  the  form  the  "how"  took  in  Aeschylus,  is  still  the  theme 
of  Hardy.  And  just  as  I  hope  to  show  that  Schopenhauer 
and  Hardy  delineate  the  same  country,  the  one  by  a  relief 
map,  the  other  by  a  model  of  villages  and  fields,  animals  and 


people,  which  serve  but  to  accentuate  the  hills  and  valleys  of 
the  severer  map;  so  all  the  philosophers,  all  the  great  writers, 
save  the  absolute  realists,  have  ever  striven  to  mirror  the  great 
country  that  lies  beyond.  Life  is  greater,  stronger,  infinitely 
more  interesting  than  books,  be  they  of  philosophy,  or  be  they 
of  poetry ;  and  as  long  as  we  have  men  of  the  Lafcadio  Hearn 
type,  which  will  be  as  long  as  we  have  men  at  all,  profoundly 
interested  in  the  "Universal  Riddle",  in  "the  Whence,  the 
Whither,  the  Why",  thes6  will  be  the  real  topics  of  philosophy 
and  of  literature.  The  genuine  kinship  has  always  been  there, 
and  always  will  be  there ;  it  merely  happens  that  in  our  day  we 
are  privileged  to  see  the  joining  of  hands. 

Philosophy,  politics,  finance,  science,  almost  any  subject 
man  can  think,  may  enter  literature,  as  long  as  it  enters  by 
way  of  man's  feelings;  but  let  it  once  attempt  to  get  in  by  the 
door  of  his  intellect,  and  all  is  lost.  Didacticism  is  the  one 
enemy  of  literature,  purpose  the  one  dragon  that  rouses  the 
St.  George  in  her.  As  soon  as  Purpose  with  a  capital  P 
begins  to  strut,  art  dwindles  to  a  little  a,  and  that  is  a 
synonym  of  mediocrity.  /~*S 

In  Paul  Bourget's  Le  Disciple,  we  have  an  openly 
philosophical  story.  The  hero,  a  philosopher,  has  been  deeply 
influenced  by  the  thought  of  an  older  philosopher,  whose 
fundamental  principle  is  that  the  world  is  a-moral,  because 
man  must  follow  out  a  given  nature,  and  is  therefore  irrespon- 
sible for  his  acts,  which  can  not  be  judged  as  good  or  bad. 
The  hero  regards  himself  as  a  psychological  problem,  and  jots 
down  in  a  note-book  his  various  emotions  as  he  tries  to  seduce 
a  young  and  noble  girl,  grows  to  love  her,-  does  seduce  her, 
breaks  the  suicide  pact  he  had  formed  with  her,  and,  when 
she  takes  her  own  life,  is  arrested  for  her  murder.  From 
beginning  to  end  the  story  holds  your  attention,  but  it  holds 
you  as  the  story  of  the  three  Leonies  who  inhabited  one  body, 
or  any  other  tale  of  the  Society  for  Psychical  Research  holds 
you,  through  your  curiosity  and  not  through  your  artistic  sense. 

There  could  be  no  better  example  of  what  Hardy  has  not 
done.  You  will  not  find  in  him  any  such  open,  direct,  frank 
statement  of  the  Schopenhauerian  philosophy,  as  Bourget  has 
given  of  Spinoza.    Hardy  is  not  deliberately  setting  forth  any 


( 


10 

philosophical  system,  neither  that  of  any  pronounced  philos- 
opher, nor  even  his  own,  unless  it  be  in  The  Dynasts.  He  is 
too  true  to  nature  for  that.  (  He  knows  that  men  do  not  live 
by  consistent  systems  of  conduct  and  thought;  that  there  are 
all  the  impulses  and  instincts  to  be  reckoned  with ;  that  even 
Schopenhauer,  who  thought  he  had  found  an  unfailing  solu- 
tion, did  not  himself  follow  the  path  of  his  denial  of  the 
"will  to  live." 

Philosophy  is  a  part  of  life  because  it  stands  for  man's 
groping  after  the  unknown,  his  attempt  to  comprehend  what 
is  given,  but  it  must  always  follow  after  and  never  precede. 
Man  acts,  then  he  reflects,  or  in  the  phrase  of  a  Von  Hartmann, 
the  Unconscious  comes  before  the  Conscious.  All  of  which 
Hardy  realizes.  One  suspects  that  he  has  been  a  great  reader 
J?  of  philosophy,  partly  because  he  mentions  the  names  of  so 
many  philosophers  in  his  books,  partly  because  it  seems  natural  . 
and  consistent  for  a  man  who  is  so  oppressed  and  depressed 
by  the  lack  of  system  in  the  world,  to  seek  for  a  clue  among 
the  people  who  have  gone  at  the  problem  instead  of  around  \C 
But  whatever  raw  material  he  has  gained  in  his  search  he  has 
refrained  from  inflicting  on  his  reader.  He  has  the  power  of 
assimilation,  of  stamping  his  thought  with  his  own  individual- 
ity; so  that  the  philosophy  which  we  find  in  his  books  is  his 
own,  a  true  native  product,  no  matter  whence  the  seeds  were 
imported. 

Why,  then,  is  he  selected  as  an  illustration  of  the  philos- 
ophy of  Schopenhauer?  Simply  because  any  one  who  is 
familiar  with  the  main  points  of  the  Schopenhauerian  philos- 
ophy, and  reads  Hardy  feels  that  here  is  a  curious  sympathy 
of  outlook  upon  life.  Here  are  two  men  who  view  life  through 
the  same  glasses,  dark  glasses  if  you  will,  lenses  that  distort 
if  you  will,  but  lenses  that  are  similar,  surely.  How  far 
Schopenhauer  is  responsible  for  this  attitude  of  Hardy  seems, 
at  present,  a  question  which  can  be  limited,  but  not  answered. 
One  must  await  a  fuller  biography  or  an  autobiographical 
statement.  The  mention  of  Schopenhauer  in  Tess,  and  in  a 
letter  in  the  Academy  concerning  Maeterlinck's  "Apology  for 
Nature"  justify  the  assumption  that  he  is  at  least  familiar  with 
the  work  of  that  philosopher.     In  a  letter,  however,  which  he 


II 

very  courteously  sent  me  in  answer  to  an  inquiry,  Mr.  Hardy 
speaks  of  his  philosophy  being  a  development  from  Schopen-  N 
hauer  through  later  philosophers.  So  we  can  only  proscribe 
limits  to  the  question.  On  the  one  hand,  he  has  not  delib- 
erately and  consciously  set  out  to  give  artistic  expression  to 
the  Schopenhauerian  philosophy;  on  the  other  he  constantly 
suggests  it.  Influence  is  too  strong  and  definite  a  word  for 
the  result  attained,  sympathy  comes  nearer  to  it.  There  is  a 
noteworthy  and  observable  sympathy  between  the  philosophy 
of  Thomas  Hardy  and  that  of  Schopenhauer. 

Those  words,  the  philosophy  of  Hardy,  lead  one  back  for 
a  moment  to  the  inartistic  novel  of  Bourget.  Is  Hardy 
artistic  or  does  he,  as  Lionel  Johnson  suggests  in  speaking  of 
Tess,  need  to  be  separated  from  his  own  philosophy  before  he  ? 
can  be  enjoyed  ?  Certainly  most  people  separate  them.  They  , 
like  him  because  he  brings  all  Wessex  to  them,  because  he  - 
takes  them  out-of-doors,  because  he  pleases  their  delicate  sense 
of  humor,  but  always  in  spite  of  his  philosophy.  All  of  which 
is  justifiable.  There  is  no  law,  artistic  or  moral,  commanding 
people  to  look  into  the  depths  of  life,  and  the  depths  of  Hardy 
are  stern  and  lead  only  to  a  negative  courage.  Nevertheless, 
such  a  separation  proves  only  the  reader's  inherent  need  of 
brightness,  not  Hardy's  need  of  revision.  The  question  is  the 
old  one  of  whether  a  man  must  keep  his  own  personality  out 
of  his  books  entirely,  or  whether  he  may  occasionally  play 
the  part  of  the  Greek  chorus  and  take  the  reader  aside  for  a 
moment.  Some  of  us  consider  that  trait  Thackeray's  great 
weakness,  others  of  us  are  very  grateful  to  him  for  being  weak. 

It  is  a  matter  of  interest  that  both  Hardy  and  Bourget 
have  spoken  in  the  same  magazine,  the  Eclectic  for  June,  1891, 
in  favor  of  subjectivism  in  art.  Bourget  thinks  that  events 
are  interesting  because  of  their  interest  to  the  narrator,  and 
that  whatever  is  interesting  to  the  narrator  is  a  subject  for 
art ;  provided  only,  that  it  be  artistically  presented.  "In  every 
novel,"  he  says,  "the  primary  condition  is,  that  it  must  be  an 
imaginative  fragment  of  human  life."  By  this  formula,  "the 
novel  is  distinguished  from  psychology  pure  and  simple.  La 
Bruyere  in  his  Caracteres,  La  Rochefoucauld  in  his  Maximes, 
differ  from  the  novelist  merely  by  lacking  this  color  of  life. 


12 

They  have  observation,  profound  or  comic  touches,  every- 
thing, indeed,  except  the  power  of  painting  human  beings  as 
they  act  or  feel." 

Hardy,  in  like  manner,  thinks  that  art  lies  in  the  way  in 
which  a  matter  is  presented.  "The  most  devoted  apostle  of 
realism,  the  sheerest  naturalist,  cannot  escape,  any  more  than 
the  withered  old  gossip  over  her  fire,  the  exercise  of  Art  in 
his  labor  or  pleasure  of  telling  a  tale."  He  continues,  "With 
our  widened  knowledge  of  the  universe  and  its  forces,  and 
man's  position  therein,  narrative,  to  be  artistically  convincing, 
must  adjust  itself  to  the  new  alignment,  as  would  also  artistic 
works  in  form  and  color,  if  further  spectacles  in  their  sphere 
could  be  presented.  v  Nothing  but  the  illusion  of  truth  can 
permanently  please,  and  when  the  old  illusions  begin  to  be 
penetrated,  a  more  natural  magic  has  to  be  supplied."  % 

With  the  same  theory,  then,  that  anything  may  be  a  sub- 
ject of  fiction,  provided  it  is  presented  in  a  manner  true  to  life, 
and  that  the  narrator  has  the  right  to  play  the  part  of  colorist, 
as  he  does  in  every  day  life,  Hardy  has  succeeded,  where  in 
this  one  novel,  Le  Disciple,  Bourget  has  failed.  The  success 
of  the  former  is  due  to  his  skill  in  welding  together  two  inter- 
ests not  always  congenial,  the  pure  and  simple  story,  his 
interpretation  of  the  story.  Perhaps  there  was  never  a  time 
when  people  could  so  well  appreciate  the  compelling  need  of 
the  author  to  introduce  such  an  interpretation,  and  the  diffi- 
culty of  doing  it  well.  To-day  we  are  all  familiar  with  our 
two  selves :  the  one  which  acts,  and  the  other  which  sits  back 
and  watches  the  acting.  Selma  Lagerlof  describes  this  second 
self  as  a  creature  with  "eyes  of  ice"  and  "long,  bent  fingers," 
who  sits  in  the  soul's  darkest  corner  and  picks  to  pieces  our 
being.  She  turns  from  the  joyous  description  of  olden  times 
when  the  people  did  not  think  as  we  think,  to  tell  of  this  spirit 
of  introspection  which  makes  every  person  a  spectator  of  the 
drama  of  his  own  life.  But  just  as  the  figure  with  "the  staring, 
icy  eyes"  and  "busy,  picking  fingers"  killed  all  emotion  in  the 
beautiful  Marianne,  so  it  can  kill  all  spontaneity  in  literature, 
if  it  is  allowed  to  creep  out  too  far  from  its  corner.  It  is 
questionable  whether,  in  The  Dynasts,  Hardy  has  not  allowed 
the  second  self  to  creep  out  too  far  from  its  corner ;  although 


13 

if  Mr.  Henry  Newbolt  has  the  true  insight,  that  is  the  very 
value  oiThe  Dynasts,  a  value  we  shall  appreciate  as  we  develop""*" 
our  own  second  selves  more  and  more.  Aside  from  The 
Dynasts,  there  is  at  least  one  reader  of  Hardy  who  does  not 
feel  that  his  two  selves  are  inartistically  blended,  who  does  not 
need  to  separate  him  from  his  philosophy,  indeed  who  could 
as  little  imagine  the  Hardy  stories  without  the  gloomy  Hardy 
background,  as  those  of  Hawthorne  without  the  pensive,  ante- 
Puritan  melancholy.    In  botli  the  mood  is  the  man. 

What  is  this  mood  in  Hardy  that  so  permeates  all  his  "] 
stories?     Briefly,  that  there  is  very  much  that  is  wrong  ia_ 
the  world,  and  that  no  one  cares.    God  has  forgotten  the  Earth. 
All  creation  groaneth  and  travaileth — and  for  no  reason.    This    / 
is  the  theme  that  recurs  again  and  again  like  the  motif  of  ar 
Wagner  opera,  that  grows  loud  in  the  poems  and  the  later 
novels,  and  reaches  a  finale  in  The  Dynasts.    This,  too,  is  the 
theme  of  Schopenhauer;  the  purposelessness  of  life,  the  lack      I 
of  reason,  the  eternal  revolution  of  the  wheel,  and  the  failure 
of  events  to  lead  to  any  goal. 

Why  these  two  men  should  hold  this  view  of  life,  a  view 
which  we  have  seen  to  be  repugnant  to  the  general  mass  of 
mankind,  is,  though  an  interesting  question  in  itself,  one  that 
does  not  concern  this  study;  which  aims  merely  to  establish 
the  facts  of  the  sympathy  between  them,  and  to  show  some 
kindred  results  to  which  such  a  philosophy  led  them.  I  have 
chosen  the  facts  of  the  case  rather  than  the  theories,  in  spite 
of  the  interesting  suggestions  of  causes  that  have  occurred  to 
me,  or  have  been  mentioned  to  me,  such  as  the  hint  of  insanity 
in  the  Schopenhauer  family,  and  the  pronounced  bitterness  of 
his  character;  and  with  Hardy,  the  love  of  mediaevalism  and  of 
an  age  of  faith,  the  sense  perhaps,  that  William  Morris  had, 
that  "he  is  born  out  of  his  due  time,"  his  childlessness,  his 
residence  in  a  country  that  is  decaying  and  rapidly  becoming 
depopulated  by  the  drift  to  towns.  There  is  just  one  of  these 
suppositious  causes  that  needs  to  be  examined,  because  it  shows 
that  wheresoever  the  seeds  came,  there  was  in  Hardy  the  very 
soil  to  bring  them  to  maturity. 

A  careful  reading  of  the  poems  of  William  Barnes,  true 
and  faithful  delineator  of  the  country  he  loved  so  well,  shows 


14 

how  much  Hardy  owed  to  Wessex.  We  find  not  only  the 
fascinating  dialect  words,  "so's,"  "randy,"  "arm-in-crook," 
"hag-rid,"  and  the  descriptions  of  tranters,  club  walkings,  and 
homely  feasts,  but  the  same  fidelity  to  life,  best  appreciated  by 
those  who  have  gone  to  country  junketings,  in  describing  the 
rough  and  boisterous  dances  and  pastimes,  which  makes  the 
party  at  Tranter  Dewy's,  where  the  poor  man  felt  the  heat  too 
much,  and  that  of  Giles  Winterborne  with  its  makeshift  house- 
keeping, such  delightful  reading.  This  is  the  realism  of  Fal- 
staff  and  his  merry  comrades.  But  of  the  sense  of  the  grandeur 
and  the  sublime  forlornness  of  nature,  as  on  an  Egdon  Heath, 
Barnes  has  no  trace;  as  he  has  none  of  the  feeling  of  the 
antiquity  of  Wessex.  He  is  comparable  to  Burns.  It  is  the 
homely,  heart-touching  side  of  Wessex  he  brings  to  us;  the 
moving  days,  the  courtships,  the  happy  firesides,  the  Sundays 
when  the  farmer  walks  about  his  farm  to  enjoy  it.  And  with 
it  all  no  hint  nor  trace  of  purposelessness.  Barnes'  "God  is  in 
His  heaven,  and  all's  right  with  the  world." 

"If  winter  vrost  do  chill  the  ground, 
'Tis  but  to  bring  the  zummer  round, 
All's  well  a-lost  where  He's  a-vound 
Vor  if  'tis  right,  vor  Christes  seake 
He'll  gie  us  more  than  he  do  teake, — 
His  goodness  don't  gi'e  out,  John." 

But  even  in  a  Wessex  tavern,  or  among  the  humblest 
cottage  folk,  Hardy's  God  is  not  surely  in  His  heaven.  Like 
Dame  Quickly  in  Henry  V,  "So  a'  cried  out  'God,  God,  God' 
three  or  four  times.  Now  I,  to  comfort  him,  bid  him  a'  should 
not  think  of  God ;  I  hoped  there  was  no  need  to  trouble  himself 
with  any  such  thoughts  yet,"  they  accept  him  conventionally 
and  doubt  him  intrinsically.  "I  ha'n't  been  (to  church)  these 
three  years,"  said  Humphrey,  "for  I'm  so  mortal  sleepy  of  a 
Sunday,  and  'tis  so  mortal  far  to  get  there,  and  when  you  do 
get  there,  'tis  such  a  mortal  poor  chance  that  you'll  be  chose 
for  up  above,  when  so  many  bain't  that  I  bide  at  home  and 
don't  go  at  all." 

"Yes,  not  but  I  was  a  Methodist  once — ay,  for  a  length 
of  time.     'Twas  owing  to  my  taking,  a  house  next  door  to  a 


15 

chapel;  so  that  what  with  hearing  the  organ  bizz  like  a  bee 
through  the  wall,  and  what  with  finding  it  saved  umbrellas  on 
wet  Zundays,  I  went  over  to  that  faith  for  two  years — though 
I  believe  I  dropped  money  by  it — I  wouldn't  be  the  man  to  say 
so  if  I  hadn't." 

In  like  manner,  Barnes  says, 

"An'  if  there  be  mouths  to  be  ved, 

He  that  sent  em  £an  send  me  their  bread, 

An'  will  smile  on  the  chile 

That's  a-new  on  the  knee." 

Hardy  retorts  when  some  one  has  said,  "God  A'mighty 
always  sends  bread  as  well  as  children,"  "But  'tis  the  bread  to  « 
one  house  and  the  children  to  another."  Barnes  sees  the 
soldiers  going  away  and  sings  them  a  song  of  God-speed; 
Hardy  sees  them  going,  thinks  that  so  went  Vespasian's  legions 
and  Cerdic,  the  Saxon's  hosts  and  that  the  world  has  learned 
no  better  way.  Fancy  for  instance  what  Hardy  would  have 
told  about  the  man  who  cut  J.  L.  and  T.  D.  in  the  tree,  and 
cut  the  L  lightly  because  it  was  soon  to  turn  into  a  D.  He 
would  not  have  returned  to  fulfill  his  mission.  All  of  which 
goes  to  show  that  Empedocles'  theory  of  perception  had  a 
symbolic  truth  in  it,  like  does  perceive  like.  There  is  some-  * 
thing  in  Hardy  that  perceives  the  melancholy,  the  fatalism  of  * 
the  rustic  character,  and  the  tragedy  of  an  event.  Some  strain 
of  deepest  melancholy  must  be  innate  in  a  man  whose  thought 
when  he  sees  a  comet  is  that  when  it  returns  again  all  the 
people  now  witnessing  it  will  be  gone. 

Just  as  one  is  repelled  by  Schopenhauer's  egoism  and  his 
rancour,  so  one  is  attracted  by  Hardy^s  honesty  and  sincerity.  • 
When  he  longs  to  believe,  and  regrets  his  utter  inability  to 
have  such  faith  as  others  have,  then  one  feels  that  whatever 
may  be  the  causes  of  environment  or  heredity  that  turn  Hardy 
into  a  pessimist,  the  cause  of  causes  lies  in  himself.  Such  is 
his  nature.  Born  like  Schopenhauer  to  see  the  world  as  an 
evil  thing,  because  a  purposeless  thing. 


CHAPTER  II. 

Establishment  of  Purposelessness. 

An  unconscious  optimist  who  was  about  to  read  her  first 
Hardy  novel  and  had  been  told  she  would  find  it  pessimistic, 
remarked,  "Pessimism,  that's  when  you  look  for  the  dark  side, 
isn't  it?  And  optimism  you  look  for  the  bright.  I  always 
get  those  two  mixed  up."  It  is  doubtful  whether,  when  the 
last  word  on  these  subjects  has  been  said  by  the  philosophers 
and  thinkers,  it  will  amount  to  more  than  that,  a  looking  for 
the  dark  side  and  a  looking  for  the  bright ;  with,  perhaps,  the 
corollary  which  the  writer  of  "De  Profundis"  and  "The  Im- 
percipient"  would  surely  add  that  the  pessimist  is  under  the 
necessity  of  looking  for  the  dark,  the  optimist  for  the  bright. 
Like  all  words  which  connote  whole  developing  move- 
ments, such  as  romanticism  and  classicism;  rationalism  and 
empiricism ;  these,  opposing  terms  are  incapable  of  definition. 
We  may  strike  out  clever  analogies,  telling  words,  illuminating 
phrases  like  Pater's  "desire  of  beauty"  in  romanticism,  or  even 
witticisms  like  the  optimist  seeing  the  doughnut,  the  pessimist 
the  hole;  but  a  succinct  definition  is,  from  the  nature  of  the 
problem,  one  of  the  things  we  must  leave  for  some  super- 
sensible existence.  The  irony  of  such  words  is  that  the  very 
people  who  most  realize  their  incapability  of  definition  short 
of  a  treatise  are  the  ones  who  are  immediately  forced  to  an 
attempt  to  define,  or  to  explain  their  own  meanings.  However, 
for  the  purposes  of  this  inquiry,  the  only  limitation  that  is 
needed  is  the  generally  conceded,  because  inherent,  one  of 
opposition.  A  man  cannot  at  the  same  time  be  both  pessimist 
and  optimist.  If  the  sum  of  his  pessimistic  moments  exceeds 
,  his  optimistic  then  he  is  a  pessimist,  and  vice  versa.  It  is  a 
,  plain  question  of  sums  because  the  absolutely  consistent  pessi- 
,  mist  and  the  absolutely  consistent  optimist  are,  happily,  mere 
'    ideals. 

But  in  this  array  of  the  foemen,  there  is  one  kind  of  so- 
called  optimism  which  ought  to  be  rigorously  excluded.     I 

(16) 


17 

mean,  the  optimism  of  all  unthinking  and  of  all  superficially 
thinking  people,  the  optimism  that  rather  prides  itself  on 
shutting  its  eyes.  In  the  Return  of  the  Native,  Hardy,  speak- 
ing of  Gym  Yeobright's  features,  says  that  a  physically  beau- 
tiful man  has  become  an  anachronism.  The  "spirit  of 
sufferance"  which  has  replaced  the  "zest  for  existence"  must 
ultimately  enter  into  the  countenances  of  men.  Perhaps  it  is 
some  such  feeling  of  the  age  of  the  race  which  makes  even  the 
rawest  pessimism  seem  more  honest  and  dignified  than  this 
crude  optimism.  "What  the  Greeks  only  suspected  we  know 
well;  what  their  Aeschylus  imagined  our  nursery  children 
feel."  There  is  surely  something  in  the  race  to-day  which  makes 
despair,  rebellion,  and  the  melancholy  minor  key,  though  not 
good  in  themselves,  more  consistent  with  our  time  than  flat 
complacency. 

These  complacent  optimists  who  are  afraid  to  read,  afraid 
to  think,  lest  they  light  on  something-  to  disturb  their  equanim- 
ity, are  usually  irritated  by  pessimists.  They  would  like  to 
convert  them  and  have  the  whole  round  world  a  happy,  optimis- 
tic country  waving  palms  and  singing  songs.  Pessimists,  on 
the  contrary,  are  rather  envious  of  these  opponents,  for  pessi- 
mists are  always  full  of  self-pity  because  they  have  gone  beyond 
the  Golden  Age.  The  real  opponents  of  pessimism  are  those 
optimists  who  have  so  retained  their  touch  of  the  Golden  Age 
that  they  are  able  by  its  help  to  see  a  future  Age  of  Gold. 
These  oppose  to  the  stoicism  which  is  the  outcome  of  pessimism, 
the  "train  for  ill  and  not  for  good"  attitude,  not  the  mawkish- 
ness  nor  sentimentality  of  the  easy-going  optimism,  but  a  noble 
faith  which,  recognizing  the  dark  side  and  often  recognizing 
its  inability  to  dispel  this  gloom,  still  believes  in  the  bright 
side,  because  it  must. 

Reading,  thought,  and  observation  convince  one  that  life, 
both  in  general  and  in  the  individual,  has  two  sides,  and  that 
according  as  the  emphasis  is  shifted  we  have  optimism  or 
pessimism.  This  shifting  of  the  emphasis  depends  so  largely 
on  the  nature  of  the  individual  that  one  is  tempted  to  wonder 
whether  these  terms  are  not  purely  subjective,  and  whether 
there  exists  any  one  large-minded  enough  and  sane-minded 
enough  to  determine  whether  life  is  good  or  bad. 


i8 

All  thinking  persons  come  to  a  Tantalus-like  picture  in 
the  course  of  their  thinking.  It  is  that  man  has  certain 
instincts,  deep-ingrained,  and  that  these  are  never  satisfied. 
The  general  desire  for  happiness,  which  is  always  in  excess 
of  its  gratification;  the  desire  for  life  which  once  drove  men 
to  seek  fountains  of  perpetual  youth,  and  now  drives  them  to 
seek  cures  for  malignant  diseases  and  the  nevertheless  "quick- 
coming  death" ;  the  desire  to  do  certain  acts  without  the  accom- 
panying power  which  Browning  has  happily  expressed  in  "The 
Last  Ride,"  "What  hand  and  brain  went  ever  paired" ;  are  all 
forms  of  this  enigma.  But  more  subtle  and  more  conflicting 
are  some  of  the  answers  that  philosophy  gives  us.  Every 
people  and  every  nation  has  a  desire  for  morality,  a  desire 
sufficient  to  make  them  evolve  some  system  of  morals.  Every 
one  hopes  and  expects  to  find,  in  answer  to  this  longing,  some 

s  basis  on  which  to  build  a  universal  morality,  and  no  one  finds 
it.  Locke  in  his  discussion  of  innate  qualities  and  Hume  in  a 
truly  delightful  Gulliverian  dialogue  have  shown  that  what  is 
revered  in  one  country  is  abhorred  in  another.  Nor  has  Kant 
with  his  famous  categorical  imperative  done  any  more  than 
assume  such  a  basis.     In  the  same  way  we  have  a  passionate 

\  longing  for  certainty,  for  finding  some  one  thing  that  is  sure 
and  stable  and  to  which  we  can  cling,  something  that  is  abso- 
lute and  immutable;  and  all  we  get  from  philosophy  is  an 
overwhelming  sense  of  the  relative  nature  of  all  knowledge, 

Iand  of  the  impossibility  of  finding  the  absolute.  It  was  this 
desire  that  led  Newman  to  seek  refuge  in  the  Catholic  Church. 
If  he  could  not  reach  the  absolute  through  reason,  he  could 
cling  to  it  through  tradition.  Again,  man  has  in  him  the  sense 
V-  of  law,  so  vitally  within  him,  that,  as  Kant  has  proved,  the  law 
we  find  in  nature  we  ourselves  put  there.  One  would  naturally 
expect  to  find,  somewhere,  an  answering  law;  but  it  is  just 
this  lack  of  law  without  that  troubles  Hardy.  "Why  it  was 
that  upon  this  beautiful  feminine  tissue,  sensitive  as  gossamer, 
and  practically  blank  as  snow  as  yet,  there  should  have  been 
traced  such  a  coarse  pattern  as  it  was  doomed  to  receive ;  why 
so  often  the  coarse  appropriates  the  finer  thus,  many  thousand 
years  of  analytical  philosophy  have  failed  to  explain  to  our 
sense  of  order.     One  may,  indeed,  admit  the  possibility  of  a 


19 

retribution  lurking  in  the  catastrophe.  Doubtless  some  of  Tess 
D'Urberville's  mailed  ancestors  rollicking  home  from  a  fray 
had  dealt  the  same  wrong  even  more  ruthlessly  upon  peasant 
girls  of  their  time.  But  though  to  visit  the  sins  of  the  fathers 
upon  the  children  may  be  a  morality  good  enough  for  divini- 
ties, it  is  scorned  by  average  human  nature;  and  it  therefore 
does  not  mend  the  matter." 

So  that  one  can  turn  in  many  ways  and  find  always  some- 
thing that  baffles.  It  is  all  desires  and  longings,  unfulfillment, 
silence.  Here  is  the  dividing  of  the  ways.  According  to  the 
answer  a  man  gives  to  this  question  is  he  pessimist  or  optimist ; 
the  former,  when  he  finds  this  baffling  process  utterly  purpose- 
less, and  the  latter  when  he  sees  in  it  something  purposive.  One 
may,  for  instance,  be  a  Kant  with  an  overwhelming  love  of 
system  and  because  one  has  seen  man's  necessity  to  put  law  in 
nature  feel  the  need  of  formulating  postulates  that  bring  law 
outside  of  nature.  Put  as  much  purpose  as  you  can  in  nature, 
says  Kant,  and  your  life  will  have  unity.  Or  one  may  take  the 
attitude  of  Lafcadio  Hearn  which  is,  in  part,  the  attitude  of 
Maeterlinck,  that  this  longing  will  grow  so  imperious,  so 
merciless  that  it  must  evolve  within  men  new  powers  which 
will  enable  them  to  achieve  the  impossible,  to  perceive  the 
invisible.  Or  one  may  take  the  Pragmatic  attitude,  what  is 
useful  is  believable;  or  the  simple  Christian  attitude  of  those 
who  having  not  seen,  still  believe.  All  these  varying  solu- 
tions will  help  men  to  infer  a  purpose  where  no  purpose  is  to 
be  seen. 

But  there  are  others  who  find  no  comfort  in  these  answers, 
because  they  can  never  forget  the  injustice  of  the  question. 
Such  a  one  is  Mr.  Hardy  when  he  replies  to  some  one  who  has 
vindicated  M.  Maeterlinck's  "Apology  for  Nature,"  that 
though  she  is  not  just  from  our  point  of  view,  she  may  practice 
a  scheme  of  morality  unknown  to  us.  "Far  be  it  from  my  wish 
to  disturb  any  comforting  fantasy,  if  it  be  barely  tenable.  But, 
alas,  no  profound  reflection  can  be  needed  to  detect  the  sophis- 
try of  M.  Maeterlinck's  arguments,  and  to  see  that  the  original 
difficulty  recognized  by  thinkers  like  Schopenhauer,  Hartmann, 
Haeckel,  etc.,  and  by  most  of  the  persons  called  pessimists, 
remains  unsurmounted.     Pain  has  been  and  pain  is;  no  new 


\ 


20 

set  of  morals  in  Nature  can  remove  pain  from  the  past  and 
make  it  pleasure  for  those  who  are  its  infallible  estimators, 
the  bearers  thereof.  And  no  injustice,  however  slight,  can  be 
atoned  for  by  her  future  generosity,  however  ample,  so  long 
as  we  consider  Nature  to  be,  or  to  stand  for,  unlimited  power. 
The  exoneration  of  an  omnipotent  Mother  by  her  retrospective' 
justice  becomes  an  absurdity  when  we  ask,  what  made  the 
foregone  injustice  necessary  to  Her  Omnipotence?"  He  then 
suggests  that  Nature  is  either  blind  or  an  automaton,  which 
simply  throws  the  responsibility  a  stage  further  back. 

Schopenhauer,  as  Hardy  suggests,  recognizes  a  difficulty. 
He  accepts  all  Kant's  subjectivism  and  believes  that  the  world 
is  his  idea,  but  he  does  not  accept  Kant's  sense  of  purposive- 
ness.  He  finds  instead,  back  of  the  worlds  a  blind  and  purpose- 
.  less^"witeQ^velLj^lnch  Is"  ever^vajrmg_uj>on  itself,  ever 
"consuming  itself  because  that  isut£  nature^  In  a  sense,  Schopen- 
hauer is  the  exceptional,  Kant  the  normal  man.  All  of  us 
would  gladly  add  to  the  mechanical  purposiveness,  which  even 
pessimists  unhesitatingly  accept,  a  teleological  purposiveness. 
Most  of  us  can  do  so;  there  are  those  here  and  there  who 
cannot.  As  Mr.  Housman  says,  on  them  is  the  burden.  "Them 
it  was  their  poison  hurt." 

We  sometimes  speak  as  if  pessimism  were  a  new  growth, 
a  thing  of  our  own  time,  and  forget  that  the  Job-like  type  of 
man  has  always  been  with  us.  The  prosperity  of  the  sinner 
is  the  theme  of  the  three  books  of  wisdom  literature :  "Eccle- 
siastes,"  "Ecclesiasticus'vand  "Wisdom  of  Solomon";  while 
the  corresponding  punishment  of  the  righteous  is  portrayed  in 
"Job."    Old  Omar  Khayyam  felt  the  impotence  of  the  world. 

"And  that  inverted  Bowl  we  call  the  Sky, 
Whereunder  crawling  coop'd  we  live  and  die ; 
Lift  not  thy  hands  to  It  for  help — for  It 
Rolls  impotently  on  as  Thou  and  I." 

Lucretius  felt  the  power  of  the  "will  to  live,"  in  all  its 
force.  "Moreover,  we  are  ever  engaged,  ever  involved  in  the 
same  pursuits,  and  no  new  pleasure  is  struck  out  by  living  on ; 
but  whilst  what  we  crave  is  wanting,  it  seems  to  transcend  all 
the  rest;  then,  when  it  has  been  gotten,  we  crave  something 


21 

else,  and  ever  does  the  same  thirst  of  life  possess  us,  as  we 
gape  for  it  open-mouthed."  In  somewhat  the  same  vein, 
Pascal  felt  the  restlessness  of  the  human  spirit,  "On  cherche 
le  repos  en  combattant  quelques  obstacles;  et  si  on  les  a 
surmontes,  le  repos  devient  insupportable."  Lionel  Johnson 
has  given  quotations  from  Pascal  and  from  Newman  showing 
that  they  arraigned  the  world  as  severely  as  Hardy.  They  see 
only  the  bitterness  and  misery  of  man,  and  no  reflection  of  the 
world's  creator.  But,  as'  he  shows,  they  both  find  something 
within  them  which  prevents  their  reaching  the  conclusion  that 
actual  experience  would  force  upon  them. 

It  is  just  in  this  respect  that  both  Hardy  and  Schopenhauer 
often  seem  more  oriental  than  occidental.  As  long  as  men 
retain  a  belief  in  a  future  life  where  all  debts  may  be  paid,  and 
injustice  compensated  with  hundred-fold  justice,  they  will  find 
excuses  for  the  criss-cross  management  of  this  world.  But 
when  that  is  gone,  as  it  is  with  Hardy  and  was  with  Schopen- 
hauer, the  full  weight  of  purposelessness  breaks  upon  them. 
Moreover,  if  they  are  keenly  alive  to  human  suffering,  their 
woe  is  increased.  That  Schopenhauer,  in  spite  of  his  contempt 
for  the  average  man,  was  very  sensitive  to  human  misery,  we 
know  from  accounts  of  his  boyhood.  Hardy's  humanitarianism 
shows  in  the  boy  Jude,  who  will  not  step  on  earth-worms ;  in 
Gabriel  Oak  who  when  he  sees  the  dead  sheep,  thinks  first  of 
their  misery,  then  of  his  loss  in  money ;  and  in  Tess  who  was 
most  tender  to  all  life. 

The  Schopenhauerian  philosophy  which  is  spread  through 
so  many  volumes  is,  thanks  to  his  habits  of  reiteration,  capable 
of  a  brief  statement.  With  the  more  genuinely  philosophical 
parts,  the  criticism  of  K^ant  and  the  welding  together  of  some 
of  the  Kantian  doctrines,  we  have  nothing  to  do.  Schopen- 
hauer believed  that  he  had  made  a  great  discovery,  that  he  was 
unique  among  philosophers  and  would  ever  occupy  the  highest 
niche  of  philosophical  fame.  Time  has  shown  how  he  over- 
estimated his  powers,  but  it  has  also  popularized  his  thought 
and  some  of  his  expressions.  His  system  has  two  main  ideas 
which  give  the  title  to  his  chief  work,  Die  Welt  als  Wille  und 
Vorstelhing.  The  first  consideration  in  this  volume,  that  the 
world  is  Idea,  is  akin  to  the  subjective  idealism  of  the  earlier 


22 

German  school.  Schopenhauer  has  given  the  term  Idea  to  this 
theory  that  the  world  of  phenomena  is  an  appearance  dependent 
upon  the  nature  of  the  observer,  and  he  is  fond  of  alluding  to 
the  eastern  religions,  which  habitually  show  that  the  world  is 
illusion,  the  "veil  of  Maya."  Such  a  belief  breathed  in  for 
centuries  as  in  Japan  and  India,  would  doubtless  color  life  and 
eventually  literature,  but  in  the  less  mystic  occidental  countries, 
it  has  not  yet  permeated  fiction,  and  one  feels  that  as  far  as 
life  and  books  are  concerned  a  man  may  regard  the  world  as 
something  subjective  or  something  objective  and  his  neighbors 
will  perceive  no  difference  in  his  daily  conduct  and  his  artistic 
productions.  There  are  passages  in  Hardy's  novels  which  just 
suggest  this  subjective  idealism,  as  when  he  speaks  of  Tess 
fancying  the  natural  processes  were  part  of  her  own  story,  and 
adds  "for  the  world  is  only  a  psychological  phenomenon,  and 
what  they  seemed  they  were";  but  though  such  views  may 
belong  to  his  speculative  hours,  they  are  not  vital  enough  to  his 
whole  work  to  need  consideration ;  and  therefore  we  can  dismiss 
this  side  of  Schopenhauer. 

With  this  philosopher,  however,  the  world  is  not  only 
Idea,  but  Will,  and  to  make  clear  the  nature  of  this  Will  is  his 
whole  end  and  aim.  His  full  discovery  is  not  the  mere  recog- 
nition of  the  "will  to  live,"  which  Aristotle  for  one  had  men- 
tioned, but  the  nature  and  overwhelming  importance  of  this 
desire,  and  its  far-reaching  effects.  Not  only  is  the  second 
book  of  Die  Welt  als  Wille  und  Vorstellung  an  exposition  of 
this  thesis,  but  all  the  work  of  Schopenhauer,  save  in  those 
places  where  he  vents  his  ire  and  spleen  and  venom  on  Fichte, 
Hegel  and  Schelling,  is  an  exploitation  of  the  importance  of 
the  "will-to-live." 

The  World  as  Will  is  the  basis,  the  "Grund"  of  the  World 
as  Idea.  All  the  phenomenal  world,  all  this  veil  of  illusion,  is 
the  direct  result  of  the  "will  to  live."  The  Will  in  its  struggle 
for  existence  takes  the  form,  for  instance,  of  rock  crystals,  of 
bees,  of  flowers,  of  man ;  yet  the  will  does  not  divide  itself  up 
and  apportion  such  an  amount  for  minerals,  such  for  vege- 
tables, such  for  animals.  It  is  one  and  the  same  Will  for  all, 
although  in  the  crystal  it  is  too  vague  to  be  formulated,  in  the 
bee  it  may  take  the  form  of  a  will  of  the  species,  as  Maeter- 


23 

linck  has  adequately  shown  in  the  Life  of  the  Bee,  in  man,  of 
the  individual  will.  Just  here  enters  the  tragedy  of  the  Will. 
It  cannot  take  all  these  forms  without  having  the  forms  come  I 
into  conflict.  It  is  as  if  there  were  one  small  basin  of  soap- 
suds and  twenty  children  who  wanted  to  blow  bubbles.  Some 
will  be  pushed  aside,  some  will  secure  only  a  dip  of  the  pipe, 
and  none  will  have  as  much  of  the  bubble  material  as  they 
want.  "Thus  everywhere  in  nature  we  see  strife,  conflict,  and 
alternation  of  victory,  and*' in  it  we  shall  come  to  recognize 
more  distinctly  that  variancejwith  itself  which  is  essential  to  - 
the  will.  Every  grade  of  the  object ification  of  will  fights  for 
the  matter,  the  space  and  the  time  of  the  others.  The  perma- 
nent matter  must  constantly  change  its  form;  for  under  the 
guidance  of  causality,  mechanical,  physical,  chemical  and 
organic  phenomena,  eagerly  striving  to  appear,  wrest  the 
matter  from  each  other,  for  each  desires  to  reveal  its  own  Idea.  _, 
This  strife  may  be  followed  through  the  whole  of  nature, 
indeed  nature  exists  only  through  it."  Kant  showed  in  the 
course  of  his  discussion  of  the  purpose  in  nature,  that  the 
vegetable  kingdom  seems  to  exist  for  the  herbivorous  animals, 
the  herbivorous  for  the  carnivorous,  and  these  in  turn  for  the 
use  of  man ;  but  looked  at  in  another  way,  which  he  attributed 
to  Linnaeus,  man  thins  out  the  carnivorous  animals,  who  in 
turn  thin  out  the  herbivorous,  who  perform  the  necessary 
thinning  out  of  the  crowded  vegetable  kingdom.  Therefore 
one  could  never  conclude,  thinks  Kant,  which  was  the  purpose 
of  nature,  man  or  the  vegetable  kingdom ;  and  he  proceeds  to 
attack  the  problem  in  another  way.  With  Schopenhauer  the 
conclusion  matters  less  than  the  nature  of  the  problem.  Since 
you  have  the  same  will  in  animals,  minerals,  vegetables,  you 
have  a  will^at  war  with  itself;  and  it  is  this  sense  that  the  will 
feeds  on  itself  which  makes  him  call  it  blind  and  purposeless. 
The  two  characteristics  of  the  will,  then,  are  desire  to 
exist  and  strife  for  existence.  This  makes  the  wheel  of  life,  t 
The  will  cannot  stop  willing  since  that  is  its  very  nature,  is 
all  that  it  is,  and  as  long  as  it  wills,  it  must  of  necessity  will 
conflict.  "The  inner  being  of  unconscious  nature  is  a  constant 
striving  without  end  and  without  rest."  But  in  man  this  will 
reaches  its  greatest  tragedy  because  man  alone  grows  con- 


24 

scious  of  the  will's  irresponsible  and  capricious  character. 
Therefore  man  when  he  becomes  sufficiently  introspective  is 
sick  at  heart  and  despairing,  and  longs  to  escape  from  a  world 
which  is  such  a  pitiable  farce.  Moreover,  man  has  an  added 
drop  of  bitterness,  because  while  in  the  lower  forms  of  life, 
species  contends  with  species  or  individual  with  individual,  in 
man  the  individual  is  himself  a  battle  ground.  There  are 
moods  when  no  book  of  the  Bible  satisfies  us  as  does  "Eccle- 
siastes." They  are  the  moments  when  it  comes  home  to  us 
that  love,  ambition,  pleasure  must  all  end  in  satiety.  Schopen- 
hauer gives  us  an  intensified  Ecclesiastes.  /For  not  only  is  the 
result  of  every  desire  "vanity  and  vexation  of  spirit,"  but  the 
real  irony  lies  in  the  necessity  of  desiring.  No  sooner  have  we 
become  bored  with  one  thing,  than  we  long  for  another;  we 
obtain  that,  only  to  fail  to  find  satisfaction  in  it,  and  to  grasp 
at  something  else.  We  continue  this  senseless  revolution,  even 
after  we  realize  that  it  can  never  bring  us  anywhere,  just 
because  of  the  strength  of  the  will  that  is  in  us. 

The  man  of  Ecclesiastes  had  the  relief  of  a  wholesome 
fear  of  God ;  the  Schopenhauerian  man  has  no  God  to  fear,  nor 
would  he  be  worth  fearing  if  he  had  one.  Where,  then,  is 
there  any  relief  ?  Schopenhauer  points  out  two,  one  temporary, 
the  other  permanent.  The  first  is  the  enjoyment  of  the  beau- 
tiful, the  second  is  the  famous  denial  of  the  "will  to  live."  In 
the  third  book  of  Die  Welt  ah"W\lle  imi  Vorstetlimgi^m  which 
Schopenhauer  treats  of  the  beautiful,  he  is  very  close  to  Plato's 
"Doctrine  of  the  Ideas."  Beauty  is  something  objective,  some- 
thing which  the  artist  or  the  appreciator  of  art  sees  outside 
himself,  and  endeavors  to  express  or  to  understand.  It  is 
said  of  Michael-  Angelo  that  he  saw  the  statue  in  the  marble 
and  freed  it.  In  the  process  of  freeing,  our  philosopher  would 
say,  the  artist  loses  himself,  and  forgets  the  misery  of  exist- 
ence; in  the  process  of-  contemplating  what  is  freed,  the 
observer  passes  out  of  himself  for  the  moment.  They  substi- 
tute for  their  sense  of  what  is  individual,  the  sense  of  what  is 
universal,  what  is  an  archetype ;  but  in  time  this  larger  outlook 
becomes  unsatisfactory  also,  because  it,  too,  is  seen  to  be  only 
another  form  of  the  vision  of  unrest.  So  this  release  is  but 
transitory.     The  ultimate  deliverance  lies  in  the  denial  of  the 


25 

will,  and  the  path  of  denial  is  the  path  of  asceticism.  By 
stifling  every  desire,  curtailing  every  longing,  ceasing  to  will, 
one  annihilates  the  will  itself,  and  has  the  reward  of  pure 
nothingness. 

Schopenhauer,  then,  answers  the  "Universal  Riddle"  by 
concluding  it  is  not  worth  answering.  By  an  examination  of 
what  makes  up  the  riddle  we  find  that  pain  is  within  man  and 
the  world,  is  their  very  nature,  and  that  therefore  they  cannot 
hope  to  escape  from  it.  It  serves  no  end,  leads  to  no  outcome, 
is  decreed  for  no  reason,  so  we  have  the  Schopenhauerian  pur- 
poselessness.  Nature  is  law-abiding,  man  is  law-abiding,  but 
for  what  reason,  since  there  is  no  final  law?  As  Hoffding 
says,  he  has  broken  with  "the  fundamental  presupposition  of  a 
harmony  of  existence  on  which  western  theology  and  philos- 
ophy had  more  or  less  decidedly  always  been  based." 

To  darken  the  picture  more,  Schopenhauer  allows  man 
little  freedom  except  the  freedom  of  the  denial  of  the  "will-to- 
live."  Otherwise  man  has  the  position  of  a  victim.  He  is  the 
prey  of  his  own  characteristics  which  are  largely  determined 
for  him,  and  he  is  the  prey  of  the  chances  of  nature.  "Brute 
chance"  Professor  Royce  calls  it,  recognizing  with  Schopen- 
hauer its  utterly  irresponsible  character.  Sometimes  it  is  so 
insidious  as  to  seem  designedly  malignant,  always  it  is  capri- 
cious. In  one  of  his  minor  essays,  "The  Art  of  Controversy," 
Schopenhauer  thus  expresses  the  complete  irrationality  of  this 
force.  "Consider  that  chance,  which  with  error,  its  brother, 
and  folly,  its  aunt,  and  malice,  its  grandmother,  rules  in  this 
world;  which  every  year  and  every  day,  by  blows  great  and 
small,  embitters  the  life  of  every  son  of  earth,  and  yours  too ; 
consider,  I  say,  that  it  is  to  this  wicked  power  you  owe  your 
prosperity  and  independence;  for  it  gave  you  what  it  refused 
to  many  thousands,  just  to  be  able  to  give  it  to  individuals  like 
you.  m  Remembering  all  this,  you  will  not  behave  as  though 
you  ha/l  a  right  to  the  possession  of  its  gifts ;  but  you  will 
pefceiv*  what  a  capricious  mistress  it  is  that  gives  you  her 
favours;  and  therefore  when  she  takes  it  into  her  head  to 
deprive  you  of  some  or  all  of  them,  you  will  not  make  a  great 
fuss  about  her  injustice;  but  you  will  recognize  that  what 
chance  gave,  chance  has  taken  away." 


26 

The  Schopenhauerian  quarrel  with  existence,  then,  is  a 
quarrel  with  its  irrational  and  inharmonious  character.  We 
find  a  world  where  individuals  exist  by  devouring  other  indi- 
viduals, types  by  crowding  out  types;  we  find  also  a  world 
where  chance  reigns,  heaping  up  benefits  and  taking  away 
necessities,  irrespective  of  actual  wants  and  deserts;  some- 
times refusing  its  aid  at  the  psychological  moment;  again 
thrusting  it  in  when  the  need  is  not  there.  The  real  pain  of 
life  is  thus  the  pain  of  life  as  a  whole.  We  feel  this  when  we 
look  beyond  our  own  unhappy  selves  or  beyond  any  tragic 
event;  and  see  that  all  are  but  parts  of  this  total  undirected 
blindness.  If  we  think  of  some  Cause  for  this  blindness,  we 
can  only  scorn  it;  because  such  a  Cause  must  be  omnipotent.; 
and  being  omnipotent,  could  have  made  something  better  a 
possibility. 

Thomas  Hardy's  quarrel  with  existence  is  a  quarrel  with 
all  that  does  exist  and  with  what  makes  it  exist.  He  quarrels 
with  society  because  its  code  is  unfair  and  takes  no  account  of 
motives;  he  quarrels  with  nature, because  her  laws  are  cruel; 
he  quarrels  with  the  Force  back  of  nature  because  It  has 
permitted  such  a  state  of  things  to  be,  when,  being  all-powerful, 
it  could  have  decreed  otherwise.  In  The  Dynasts  he  presents 
this  view  in  the  picture  of  "A  knitter  drowsed,  whose  fingers 
play  in  skilled  unmind  fulness."  Man  must  take  what  is  knitted 
off  for  him,  by  a  knitter  who  does  not  once  glance  at  his 
needs.  Herein  lies  the  pain.  Who  would  not  suffer  for  a 
good  cause?  But  suffering  for  a  knitter  who  is  drowsed,  suf- 
fering which  may  be  absolutely  unnecessary  drives  any  one  to 
melancholy  and  despair. 

Emerson  in  his  "Threnody"  has  voiced  just  the  sense  of 
personal  unfairness  that  comes  to  all  men,  face  to  face  with 
their  first  great  sorrow : 

"I  had  the  right,  few  days  ago, 

Thy  steps  to  watch,  thy  place  to  know ; 

How  have  I  forfeited  the  right?" 

Some  men  who  question  thus,  go  on  until,  like  the  poet, 
they  find  some  solution  in  a  purpose  served  by  their  woe,  others 
forget  their  questions  only  in  the  press  of  daily  life.    It  might 


27 

be  said  of  Thomas  Hardy  that  he  is  always  facing  such  a 
question,  and  has  neither  of  the  accustomed  modes  of  relief. 
He  finds  no  acceptable  evidence  of  any  purpose  that  is  sub- 
served by  the  individual  suffering;  and  because  he  is  sensitive 
beyond  most  men,  the  press  of  life  does  not  destroy  the  sharp 
pangs  of  the  unreasonableness  of  such  suffering. 

A  rather  detailed  study  of  the  novels  and  poems  of  Hardy 
shows  how  profound  and  far-reaching  is  his  conviction  that 
the  world  we  live  in  is  an  ui/reasonable  and  inharmonious  one. 
Every  person  who  loves  the  outdoors  world  at  all  must  love 
the  outdoors  world  of  Hardy.  Lionel  Johnson  says  that  he 
has  what  Hawthorne  had,  "a  gift  of  sight  into  the  spirit  of  a 
place;  a  most  rare  gift."  Nowhere  is  this  "gift  of  sight"  more 
happily  evident  than  in  the  opening  chapter  of  The  Return  of 

hero  of  the  book.    As  such  if  is  a  typical  Hardy  hero.     "GayJ&^k, 


>& 


prospects  wed  happily  with  gay  times,"  says  Hardy,  "but  alas!^      *  i 
if  times  be  not  gay !"    "Haggard  Egdon  appealed  to  a  subtler    "^    «  4 
and  scarcer  instinct;  to  a  more  recently  learned  emotion,  than         <r 
that  which  responds  to  the  sort  of  beauty  called  charming."    i^W^ 
"The  time  seems  near,  if  it  has  not  actually  arrived,  when  the   fa* 
mournful  sublimity  of  a  moor,  a  sea,  or  a  mountain,  will  be  Ly.  ^ff 
all  of  nature  that  is  absolutely  consonant  with  the  moods  of  the  ^ 
more  thinking  among  mankind.     And  ultimately  to  the  com- 
monest tourist  spots  like  Iceland  may  become  what  the  vine- 
yards and  myrtle  gardens  of  South  Europe  are  to  him  now." 

This  "gift  of  sight"  into  the  gloomy  spirit  of  nature  is  • 
well  brought  out  in  a  passage  in  The  Mayor  of  Casterbridge  -     $&  / 
in  which  Hardy  has  been  describing  a  peaceful  scene  as  a     ^V/ 
contrast  to  the  turmoil  of  man.     One  might  "abjure  man  as  f^i^  ' 
the  blot  on  an  otherwise  kindly  universe ;  till  it  was  remembered  ^V 
that  all  terrestrial  conditions  were  intermittent ;  and  that  man- 
kind might  some  night  be  innocently  sleeping  when  these  quiet 
objects  were  raging  loud." 

In  Two  on  a  Tower  our  ordinary  feeling  that  the  sky  is  a  f^r^ 
thing  of  beauty,  worthy  of  rapt  contemplation,  is  rudely  shaken. 
"The  actual  sky  is  a  horror."  It  contains  "things  much  more 
terrible  than  monsters  of  shape,  namely,  monsters  of  magni- 
tude without  human  shape."    The  sky  goes  beyond  the  size  at 


28 

which  grandeur  begins,  beyond  that  of  solemnity,  even  beyond 
that  of  awfulness,  the  stellar  universe  has  the  she  at  which 
ghastliness  begins.  The  sky  shows  the  sense  of  inevitable 
decay,  too.  It  has  its  burnt  out  places.  If  you  want  to  remain 
cheerful,  avoid  the  study  of  astronomy.  On  the  other  hand, 
if  you  are  depressed,  it  will  help  you,  but  in  a  rather  negative 
way,  by  showing  you  that  nothing  is  important. 

Sometimes  the  Hardy  nature  dreads  life  just  as  the  Hardy 
characters  do.  Marty  South  speaks  of  the  newly  planted  trees 
sighing  as  if  they  dreaded  to  begin  to  live.  Sometimes  wild 
creatures  seem  to  feel  the  tragedy  of  existence,  as  in  Tess  when 
the  birds  which  come  from  the  north  and  have  seen  "cataclys- 
mal  horrors"  have  tragic  eyes.  Sometimes  subjectivism  is 
more  simply  expressed,  as  in  the  poems,  "The  Seasons  of  the 
Year"  and  "The  King's  Experiment,"  where  nature  is  grave 
or  gay  according  to  the  mood  of  the  observer.  However,  this 
open  personification  is  less  subtly  convincing  than  the  more 
indirect  finding  of  the  saddened  latter-day  mood  of  man  in 
nature. 

A  simple  feeling  of  gloom  in  nature  analogous  to  the 
gloom  of  man  is,  after  all,  of  trivial  importance  beside  the 
sense  of  a  lack  of  order  in  the  outside  world.  This  feeling  is 
especially  strong  in  Jude  and  Tess,  and  in  the  poems.  Jude, 
after  he  has  been  whipped  for  allowing  the  birds  to  eat  the 
grain,  instead  of  scaring  them  away  from  it,  perceives  "the 
flaw  in  the  terrestrial  scheme  by  which  what  was  good  for 
God's  birds  was  bad  for  God's  gardener."  "That  mercy  to- 
wards one  set  of  creatures  was  cruelty  towards  another  sick- 
ened his  sense  of  harmony."  Again  nature's  law  is  said  to  be 
"mutual  butchery,"  and  "cruelty  is  the  law  pervading  all  nature 
and  society;  and  we  can't  get  out  of  it  if  we  would !"  In  Tess, 
the  Durbeyfield  children  are  spoken  of  as  a  "half-dozen  little 
captives  under  hatches"  compelled  to  sail  in  the  Durbeyfield 
ship;  then  the  writer  says,  "Some  people  would  like  to  know 
whence  the  poet  whose  philosophy  is  in  these  days  deemed  as 
profound  and  trustworthy  as  his  song  is  sweet  and  pure,  gets 
his  authority  for  speaking  of  'Nature's  holy  plan.'  '  Tess 
and  her  little  brother  have  been  speaking  of  the  stars  being 
worlds,  and  Tess  says,  "They  sometimes  seem  to  be  like  the 


29 

apples  on  our  stubbard  tree,  Most  of  them  splendid  and  sound 
— a  few  blighted."  "Which  do  we  live  on,"  asks  the  boy,  "a 
splendid  one  or  a  blighted  one?"  "A  blighted  one."  "Tis 
very  unlucky  we  didn't  pitch  on  a  sound  one,  when  there  were 
so  many  more  of  'em!" 

In  a  poem  called  "Nature's  Questioning"  the  various  prod- 
ucts of  nature,  pool,  field  and  so  forth  are  represented  as  having 
lost  their  first  joy  in  being  created,  and  as  inquiring  the  reason 
for  their  existence.  The  burden  of  their  complaint  is  that  they 
are  left  to  hazard  and  not  to  law.  In  "The  Mother  Mourns," 
the  Earth  laments  that  man  has  found  her  out,  she  had  never 
intended  that  he  should  advance  to  that  point  of  keenness  which 
would  enable  him  to  discover  her  flaws.  In  other  poems  she  is 
represented  as  blind  or  asleep  or  utterly  neglectful  of  her  chil- 
dren. Perhaps  the  best  summary  of  what  Hardy  means  by  the 
lack  of  order  in  nature  and  what  Schopenhauer  meant  by  the 
struggle  of  the  will  to  obtain  objectification  is  this  passage  in 
The  Woodlanders:  "Here,  as  everywhere,  the  Unfulfilled  In- 
tention, which  makes  life  what  it  is,  was  as  obvious  as  it  could  f 
be  among  the  depraved  crowds  of  a  city  slum.  The  leaf  was^.-" 
deformed,  the  curve  was  crippled,  the  taper  was  interrupted; 
the  lichen  ate  the  vigor  of  the  stalk,  and  the  ivy  slowly  strangled 
to  death  the  promising  sapling."  &/>€fe    //0  W$  rlQ*V\6   fi£l 

Another  unfairness  in  Nature  is  that  she  seems  always  to 
throw  the  weight  of  her  approval  on  the  side  of  man's  baser  £.*JLy- 
instincts,  rather  than  on  that  of  his  nobler.  In  reading  Schop- 
enhauer, one  has  often  a  vague  feeling  that  though  the  whole 
"state  of  nature"  may  not  triumph  over  the  "state  of  grace," 
in  any  individual  it  is  likely  to  prove  the  stronger.  In  Hardy 
this  vague  suggestion  becomes  concrete  statement.  In  Tzt'o  on 
a  Tower,  in  The  Return  of  the  Native,  in  Jude,  we  have  three 
examples  of  young  men  of  the  highest  promise  and  loftiest 
aims  who  are  sWayed  from  their  careers  and  crippled,  the  first 
temporarily,  the  two  last  for  life,  by  the  sudden  cropping  out 
of  natural  instincts  which  they  are  powerless  to  subordinate.  *^< 
"In  short,  as  if  materially,  a  compelling  arm  of  extraordinary 
muscular  power  seized  hold  of  him — something  which  had 
nothing  in  common  with  the  spirits  and  influences  which  had 
moved  him  hitherto.     This  seemed  to  care  little  for  his  reason 


30 

and  his  will,  nothing  for  his  so-called  elevated  intentions,  and 
moved  him  along,  as  a  violent  schoolmaster  a  school-boy  he 
has  seized  by  the  collar,  in  a  direction  which  tended  toward 
the  embrace  of  a  woman  for  whom  he  had  no  respect,  and 
whose  life  had  nothing  in  common  with  his  own  except  lo- 
cality." 

Women  are  more  pitiably  the  victims  of  Nature's  lack  of 
sympathy  with  a  "state  of  grace"  than  men.  Who  does  not 
pity  the  three  milkmaids  with  their  hopeless,  generous  love  for 
Angel  Clare  as  we  see  them  in  the  sleeping  chamber  whose  air 
"seemed  to  palpitate  with  the  hopeless  passion  of  the  girls. 
They  writhed  feverishly  under  the  oppressiveness  of  an  emo- 
tion thrust  on  them  by  cruel  Nature's  law — an  emotion  which 
they  had  neither  expected  nor  denied."  Who  can  help  feeling 
with  Hardy  that  there  is  a  flaw  in  Tess's  guardian  angel,  that 
he  ought  to  have  told  her  Angel  Clare  was  the  man  to  make 
her  happy,  when  she  first  saw  him  dancing  on  the  green;  and 
to  have  warned  her  that  Alec  D'Urberville  would  surely  make 
her  miserable.  But  Tess's  narrator  assures  us  that  "the  call 
seldom  produces  the  comer,  the  man  to  love  rarely  coincides 
with  the  hour  for  loving.  Nature  does  not  often  say  'See !'  to 
a  poor  creature,  when  seeing  can  lead  to  happy  doing ;  or  reply 
'Here!'  to  a  body's  cry  of  'Where?'  till  the  hide-and-seek  has 
become  an  irksome,  outworn  game." 

An  unordered  world  of  nature  suggests  its  counterpart, 
an  unordered  world  of  man.  This  is  the  Hardy  attitude  toward 
history.  It  leads  nowhere,  is  a  mere  monotonous  recurrence 
of  the  same  motives,  the  same  causes,  in  varying  times  and 
places.  Thus  Tess  does  not  care  to  learn  what  will  only  show 
her  that  she  is  one  of  a  long  row,  that  others  have  had  her 
nature  and  done  her  deeds,  and  will  do  so  again.  She  wouldn't 
mind  learning  why  the  sun  shines  on  the  just  and  the  unjust 
alike ;  but  that  is  what  no  books  will  tell  her.  Ethelberta,  on 
the  other  hand,  finds  fortification  in  the  past,  but  it  is  the 
same  ironical  aid  to  courage  that  Swithin  St.  Cleeve  found  in 
the  study  of  astronomy,  the  individual  insignificance  is  lost  in 
the  general  insignificance. 

In  The  Dynasts  we  find  Hardy's  reason  why  history  pre- 
sents this  unsatisfactory  character.    History  seems  to  be  in  the 


* 


hands  of  men,  but  in  reality  it  is  not,  because  the  men  therja* — ^ 
selves  are  in  the  hands  of  an  "Immanent  Will."  The  over- 
throw of  dynasties,  the  clash  of  armies,  the  rise  and  fall  of 
nations  are  but  the  struggles  of  the  Will  to  find  expression. 
And  since  the  Will  works  unconsciously  and  even  automat- 
ically, we  have  the  same  continuous  results  "click-clacked  off;" 
but  no  hint  of  any  one  result  to  which  these  shall  lead.  Von 
Hartmann  has  this  same  yiew  of  a  force  back  of  the  will  of 
man  which  is  really  responsible.  He  calls  it  the  "Unconscious 
Will,"  and  one  recognizes  in  it  the  "will-to-live"  of  Schopen- 
hauer. The  masses  are  moved  by  instinctive  impulses,  but 
it  is  seen  later  that  they  have  been  working  out  ideas  of  this 
unconscious  will,  though  the  motives  they  have  presented  to 
themselves  are  not  these  ideas  at  all.  He  sees  in  history  a 
development  and  an  evolution,  which,  like  everything  else  in 
Von  Hartmann,  is  the  evolution  from  the  unconscious  to  the 
conscious;  but  since  the  only  result  that  he  can  predict  when 
this  total  consciousness  is  attained,  is  that  it  will  will  annihila- 
tion, most  of  us  will  be  inclined  to  agree  with  Tess  that  we 
do  not  need  to  intensify  the  picture  of  gloom  by  the  study  of 
history. 

The  feeling  that  the  world  of  man  is  also  unordered  is 
shown  in  the  lack  p£ a  vital  belieTm  God.  This  is  especially 
noticeable  among  the  rustic  characters  of  the  Hardy  novels, 
and  it  gives  to  their  speech  a  subtly  humorous  flavor  that  will 
bear  much  repetition.  "  'They  say  every  man  for  himself ;  but, 
thank  God,  I'm  not  so  mean  as  to  lessen  old  fokes'  chances  by 
being  earnest  at  my  time  o'  life,  and  they  so  much  nearer  the 
need  o't'  "  "  'Well,  sir,  'tis  much  as  before  wi'  me.  One  hour 
a  week  wi'  God  A'mighty  and  the  rest  with  the  devil,  as  a  chap 
may  say.'  "  "  'But  for  a  drunk  of  really  a  noble  class  that 
brought  you  no  nearer  to  the  dark  man  than  you  were  afore 
you  begun,  there  was  none  like  those  in  Farmer  Everdene's 
kitchen.  Not  a  single  damn  allowed ;  no,  not  a  bare  poor  one, 
even  at  the  most  cheerful  moment  when  all  were  blindest,  . 
though  the  good  old  word  of  sin  thrown  in  here  and  there  at 
such  times  is  a  great  relief  to  a  merry  soul.  .  .  .  Ay,  poor 
Charlotte,  I  wonder  if  she  had  the  good  fortune  to  get  into 
Heaven  when  'a  died !  But  'a  was  never  much  in  luck's  way, 
and  perhaps  'a  went  downwards  after  all,  poor  soul.'  " 


32 

Sometimes  the  lack  of  a  vital  belief  becomes  an  open 
doubt,  "  ' Well,  well,'  said  Mrs.  Leat,  giving  way,  'Whatever 
may  be  the  truth  on't,  I  trust  Providence  will  settle  it  all  for 
the  best,  as  he  always  do.'  "  "  'Ay,  ay,  Elizabeth/  rejoined 
Mrs.  Crickett  with  a  satirical  sigh,  'good  people  like  you  may 
say  so,  but  I  have  always  found  Providence  a  different  sort 
o£  feller.'  "  In  Desperate  Remedies  again,  Manston  and  the 
letter  carrier  hold  a  conversation  about  religion.  Manston  tells 
the  carrier  that  the  higher  class  of  mind  does  not  need  to  be 
religious,  and  that  believing  is  all  a  mistake.  "  'Well  to  be 
sure!'  says  the  carrier.  'However  believing  in  God  is  a  mis- 
take made  by  very  few  people  after  all !'  "  "  'Not  one  Chris- 
tian in  our  parish  would  walk  half  a  mile  in  a  rain  like  this 
to  know  whether  the  Scripture  had  concluded  him  under  sin  or 
grace/  "  "  'Ah,  you  may  depend  upon  it  they'll  do  away  wi' 
Goddymity  altogether,  afore  long,  although  we've  had  him 
over  us  so  many  years.'  " 

More  commonly  Providence  is  regarded  as  a  thing  to  be 
taken  into  account,  but  not  a  thing  to.  interfere  with  the  more 
serious  pursuits  of  life.  There  is  a  scene  in  Far  from  the 
Madding  Crowd  where  the  man  who  is  driving  the  wagon  con- 
taining poor  Fanny  Robin's  body,  goes  into  an  ale-house  and 
joins  two  companions.  After  they  have  decided  that  they 
ought  to  drink  because  all  men  haven't  the  gift  of  enjoying  a 
soak,  this  deserting  driver  says,  "  *,Well,  I  hope  Providence 
won't  be  in  a  way  with  me  for  my  doings.  I've  been  troubled 
with  weak  moments  lately,  'tis  true.  I've  been  drinky  once 
this  month  already,  and  I  did  not  go  to  church  A-Sunday,  and 
I  dropped  a  curse  or  two  yesterday ;  so  I  don't  want  to  go  too 
far  for  my  safety.  Your  next  world  is  your  next  world,  and 
not  to  be  squandered  offhand.'  " 

In  The  Hand  of  Ethelberta  the  clerk  won't  allow  bad 
words  to  be  said  in  the  church.  "As  far  as  my  personal  self 
goes,  I  should  have  no  objection  to  your  cussing  as  much  as 
•  you  like,  but  as  an  official  of  the  church  my  conscience  won't 
allow  it  to  be  done."  In  Jude  we  have  Arabella  taking  to 
chapel-going  after  her  husband's  death  "as  'twas  righter  than 
gin ;"  and  in  several  places  we  find  reference  to  a  special  Sun- 
day form  of  truth.     Some  one  may  say,  "All  this  is  true  to 


33 

life."  As  a  matter  of  fact  we  are  prone  to  separate  our  Sun- 
day morals  from  our  week  day  ones,  though  we  are  not  all  so 
frank  about  acknowledging  the  division.  But  the  fact  that 
this  frailty  of  human  nature  is  true  to  life  is  rather  a  point  in 
favor  of  its  significance  in  a  general  purposeless  view  of  life. 
Faith  is  lukewarm  because  there  is  nothing  to  make  it  hot. 

From  a  merely  formal  belief  in  God  to  a  sense  that  life  is 
not  worth  living  and  will  not  bear  examination  is  but  a  step. 
We  sometimes  wonder  if  there  is  a  single  Hardy  character 
who,  if  he  or  she  were  challenged  with  the  question,  "Is  life 
worth  while?"  would  answer,  "Yes."  They  are  all  like  Eus- 
tacia  Vye,  they  know  too  much  unless  they  could  know  all. 
This  is  a  characteristic  of  the  earliest  Hardy.  Farmer  Sprin- 
grove  in  Desperate  Remedies  is  described  as  feeling  with  Walt 
Whitman,  "I  foresee  too  much,  it  means  more  than  I  thought." 
One  of  the  things  that  he  foresees  is  that  his  son  Edward  may 
never  get  on  in  the  world,  "all  through  his  seeing  too  far  into 
things — being  discontented  with  makeshifts — thinking  o'  per- 
fection in  things,  and  then  sickened  that  there's  no  such  thing 
as  perfection."  Cytherea,  the  heroine,  feels  "almost  ashamed 
to  be  seen  walking  such  a  world,"  and  Manston,  the  villain, 
feels  that  it  is  necessary  to  be  honest  because  nothing  can  be 
achieved  by  stratagem  in  a  world  whose  materials  are  such  as 
he  sees. 

Even  in  his  professedly  lighter  novels  the  futility  of  life 
intrudes  upon  Hardy.  Ethelberta  wishes  she  were  in  a  quiet 
grave,  and  well  out  of  this  world;  and  laments  that  God  Al- 
mighty did  not  kill  off  three-fourths  of  the  Chickerel  family. 
Ten  children  is  a  hopeless  number.  Joey  remarks  with  the 
proud  cynicism  of  extreme  youth,  "The  world's  a  holler  mock- 
ery— that's  what  I  say."  Picotee,  who  knows,  retorts,  "Yes, 
so  it  is,  to  some,  but  not  to  you."  So,  too,  Christopher  has  to 
the  full  that  attitude  of  resignation  which  is  the  outcome  of 
gray  views  of  life. 

In  the  four  books  where  the  tragedy  is  most  intense,  The 
Mayor  of  Casterbridge,  The  Return  of  the  Native,  Tess  and 
Jude,  this  feeling  of  the  barrenness  of  life,  and  of  the  evil 
plight  of  man  in  being  alive  attains  its  culmination.  We  might 
expect  a  man  of  violent  extremes  like  the  Mayor  of  Caster- 


34 

bridge  to  have  black  moods  in  which  he  would,  like  Job,  curse 
the  day  wherein  he  was  born;  but  we  would  scarcely  antici- 
pate that  the  gentle  Elizabeth  should  appraise  life  at  a  mod- 
erate value.  Yet  she  is  first  attracted  to  Farfrae  because  he 
feels  as  she  does  about  life,  that  "though  one  could  be  gay  on 
occasion,  moments  of  gaiety  were  interludes,  and  no  part  of 
the  actual  drama."  :  When  she  is  watching  her  mother  through 
the  nights  of  illness  the  "subtle-souled  girl"  is  "asking  herself 
why  she  was  born,  why  sitting  in  a  room  and  blinking  at  the 
candle ;  why  things  around  her  had  taken  the  shape  they  wore 
in  preference  to  every  other  possible  shape.  Why  they  stared 
at  her  so  helplessly  as  if  waiting  for  the  touch  of  some  wand 
that  should  release  them  from  terrestrial  constraint ;  what  that 
chaos  called  consciousness,  which  spun  in  her  at  this  moment 
like  a  top,  tended  to,  and  began  in."  Even  after  her  "bark  has 
come  into  smooth  water,  she  is  not  exuberantly  happy,  for  she 
seems  to  feel  still  that  happiness  is  "but  the  occasional  episode 
in  a  general  drama  of  pain." 

Both  Eustacia  Vye  and  Clym  Yeobright  have  reached 
this  point  before  their  marriage.  Eustacia  idealizes  Wildeve 
because  she  has  arrived  "at  that  stage  of  enlightenment  which 
feels  that  nothing  is  worth  while,"  and  must  fill  up  her  spare 
hours.  She  tells  Clym  that  she  joins  the  mummers  to  get 
excitement  because  life  depresses  her.  He,  in  his  turn,  has 
reached  "the  stage  in  a  young  man's  life  where  the  grimness 
of  the  general  human  situation  first  becomes  clear,  and  the 
realization  of  this  causes  ambition  to  halt  awhile." 

Tess  is  wholly  convinced  that  it  would  have  been  better 
never  to  have  been  born.  "Sheer  experience  had  already 
taught  her  that,  in  some  circumstances,  there  was  one  thing 
better  than  to  lead  a  good  life,  and  that  was  to  be  saved  from 
leading  any  life  whatever."  "To  her  and  her  like,  birth  itself  j 
was  an  ordeal  of  degrading  personal  compulsion,  whose  gratu-  j 
itousness  nothing  in  the  result  seemed  to  justify,  and  at  best 
could  only  palliate."  One  relief  Tess  has,  the  same  that  Schop- 
enhauer saw  in  a  contemplation  of  the  beautiful,  and  the  sub- 
lime in  nature.  She  can  for  the  moment,  pass  out  of  herself. 
"She  knew  how  to  hit  to  a  hair's  breadth  that  moment,  of  eve- 
ning when  the  light  and  the  darkness  are  so  evenly  balanced 


35 

that  the  constraint  of  day  and  the  suspense  of  night  neutralize 
each  other,  leaving  absolute  mental  liberty.  It  is  then  that  the 
plight  of  being  alive  becomes  attenuated  to  its  least  possible 
dimension."  Relief  comes  in  forgetting  existence;  when  you 
remember  it,  when  you  see  how  "brute  chance"  rules  the  world, 
and  the  desired  always  comes  after  its  value  has  departed,  then 
you  stand  like  Angel  Clare  and  Tess,  face  to  face  after  all  their 
misfortunes  and  mistakes,  but  with  the  spectre  of  Alec  between 
them,  and  implore  something  to  shelter  you  from  reality. 

But  it  is  in  J  tide  that  the  desire  not  to  live  reaches  the 
awful.  Little  Time,  a  cousin  of  that  symbolic  child  Pearl,  in 
The  Scarlet  Letter,  never  enjoys  anything.  "  'I  am  very,  very- 
sorry,  father  and  mother.  But  please  don't  mind !  I  can't  help 
it.  I  should  like  the  flowers  very,  very  much  if  I  didn't  keep 
on  thinking  they'd  be  all  withered  in  a  few  days !'  "  When 
his  father  and  mother  have  had  trouble  to  get  a  lodging,  he 
says,  "It  would  be  better  to  be  out  o'  the  world  than  in  it, 
wouldn't  it?"  and  again,  "If  children  make  so  much  trouble, 
why  do  people  have  'em  ?"  Finally  when  the  poor  little  fellow 
has  put  an  end  to  his  questionings,  Jude  says  of  him,  "It  was 
in  his  nature  to  do  it.  The  doctor  says  there  are  such  boys 
springing  up  amongst  us  in  the  last  generation, — the  outcome 
of  new  views  of  life.  They  seem  to  see  all  its  terrors  before 
they  are  old  enough  to  have  staying  power  to  resist  them. 
He  says  it  is  the  beginning  of  the  coming  universal  wish  not 
to  live." 

r~The  sense  of  satiety  that  was  so  strong  in  Schopenhauer 
is  equally  pronounced  in  Hardy.  His  characters  are  often  con- 
scious of  their  own  perversity  in  despising  what  they  have  and 
wanting  what  they  have  not.  Some  of  them  even  guard  against 
this  frailty  by  resorting  to  self-trickery.  Eustacia  Vye,  cast 
by  a  capricious  fate  upon  a  heath  where  her  charms  are  lost, 
is  too  conscious  of  the  double  tragedy  in  man,  that  he  ever 
longs  for  what  is  beyond  his  reach,  and  quickly  learns  to  scorn 
what  he  possesses.  When  Wildeve  shows  the  independence  of 
loving  another,  she  does  all  in  her  power  to  win  him  back, 
summing  up  her  feelings  in  this  wise :  "Indeed,  I  think  I  like 
you  to  desert  me  a  little  once  now  and  then.  Love  is  the  dis- 
malest  thing,  where  the  lover  is  quite  honest.    Oh,  it  is  a  shame 


u 


36 

to  say  so,  but  it  is  true  I"  When  on  the  other  hand  she  realizes 
that  Wildeve  can  belong  to  her,  that  the  other  woman  no  longer 
wants  him,  her  passion  for  him  is  gone.  "The  sentiment  which 
lurks  more  or  less  in  all  inanimate  nature — that  of  not  desiring 
the  undesired  of  others — was  lively  as  a  passion  in  the  super- 

I subtle,  epicurean  heart  of  Eustacia." 

Eustacia  is  not  alone  in  her  preference  for  the  unattain- 
able. Ethelberta  knows  well  how  to  apply  this  psychological 
fact  to  the  practical  art  of  keeping  a  man  a  lover.  It  is  an  in- 
stinct which  she  shares  with  many  a  woman  in  real  life  who 
has  learned  how  to  turn  the  human  fickleness  to  her  own  ad- 
vantage. But  the  arts  of  all  women  in  hoodwinking  the  god 
of  fickleness  are  put  to  shame  by  the  ingenuous  device  of  the 
husband  in  Far  from  the  Madding  Crowd,  who,  finding  that 
he  was  tiring  of  his  wife,  took  off  her  ring  and  called  her  by 
her  maiden  name,  and  "as  soon  as  he  could  thoroughly  fancy 
he  was  doing  wrong  and  committing  the  seventh,  'a  got  to  like 
her  as  well  as  ever,  and  they  lived  on  a  perfect  picture  of  mutual 
love."* 

The  idea  of  the  decay  of  love  is  a  favorite  theme  with 
Hardy.  The  Wessex  Poems  have  many  hints  of  it,  the  novels 
have  many  frank  statements  of  this  change  tucked  away  in 
them.  The  Well-Beloved  is  an  idealization  of  fickleness,  and 
Jude  is  so  clear  and  open  a  statement  as  to  seem  brutal.  Many 
men  beside  Thomas  Hardy  have  realized  that  absolute  con- 
stancy in  deed,  in  thought  and  in  spirit  between  man  and 
woman,  or  even  between  friends  of  the  same  sex,  is  a  sheer 
impossibility.  Ibsen  showed  us  one  solution  in  Love's  Comedy, 
Hardy  gives  us  another  in  Jude.  And  both  of  them  bear  the 
onus  of  having  ruthlessly  dragged  to  light  a  lurking  problem 
we  would  fain  forget. 

The  nature  in  man  decrees  that  he  shall  lightly  value  what 
he  has  and  desire  what  he  does  not  own.  The  "brute  chance" 
outside  of  him  adds  this  bitter  drop  that  so  long  as  he  desires 
he  seldom  attains,  but  when  he  has  ceased  from  wishing,  the 
once  coveted  is  often  given  to  him.  So  Christopher  tells  Ethel- 
berta, who  has  remarked  that  at  the  bottom  of  her  heart  she 
doesn't  care  whether  she  succeeds  or  not,  "For  that  very  reason 
you  are  likely  to  do  it.     My  idea  is,  make  ambition  your  busi- 


37 

ness  and  indifference  your  relaxation,  and  you  will  fail;  but 
make  indifference  your  business  and  ambition  your  relaxation, 
and  you  will  succeed.  So  impish  are  the  ways  of  the  gods." 
To  realize  how  deep-imbedded  is  this  instinct,  we  have  only 
to  reflect  how  often  we  shrink  from  revealing  our  real  desires 
or  how  we  pretend  that  we  have  others,  just  because  we  are 
afraid  that  the  very  whisper  of  them  will  attract  ill-luck  to 
them.  "A  fancy  some  people  hold,  when  in  a  bitter  mood," 
says  Hardy  in  A  Pair  of  6lue  Eyes,  "is  that  inexorable  circum- 
stance only  tries  to  prevent  what  intelligence  attempts.  Re- 
nounce a  desire  for  a  long-contested  position,  and  go  on  an- 
other tack,  and  after  awhile  the  prize  is  thrown  at  you,  seem- 
ingly in  disappointment  that  no  more  tantalizing  is  possible. " 

This  is  akin  to  the  philosophy  of  renunciation  taught  Eliz- 
abeth Jane  by  a  checkered  life.  For  she  is  of  the  stern  stuff 
that  will  not  speak  in  favor  of  compensation.  She  can  resign 
herself,  she  can  bow  to  the  inevitable,  but  she  will  never  admit 
that  what  has  been  given  her  is  better  than  what  she  sought. 
"Yet  her  experience  had  consisted  less  in  a  series  of  pure  dis- 
appointments than  in  a  series  of  substitutions.  Continually  it 
had  happened  that  what  she  had  desired  had  not  been  granted 
her,  and  what  had  been  granted  her  she  had  not  desired.  So 
she  viewed  with  an  approach  to  equanimity  the  now  cancelled 
days  when  Donald  had  been  her  undeclared  lover,  and  won- 
dered what  unwished  for  thing  Heaven  might  send  her  in 
place  of  him.,, 

The  reason  that  a  man  like  Hardy  can  not  be  lightly  set 
aside,  as  those  who  wish  to  preserve  the  illusion  that  the  world 
is  wholly  fair,  would  counsel,  is  that  his  most  gloomy  utter- 
ances find  an  echo  in  our  daily  experiences.  Very  probably 
we  consider  it  wise  to  ignore  these  facts,  or  to  give  them  a 
different  explanation,  but  we  must  admit  they  are  there,  and 
are  no  figments  of  a  pessimistic  imagination.  Ethelberta's 
butler  father  read  human  nature  truly.  "People  always  want 
what's  kept  from  them,  and  don't  value  what's  given."  Tess 
is  true  to  the  general  attitude  of  regarding  evil  as  the  natural 
lot  of  mankind,  and  expecting  bad  luck  even  in  trivial  affairs, 
when  she  says,  "All  this  good  fortune  may  be  scourged  out  o' 
me  afterwards  by  a  lot  of  ill.    That's  how  God  mostly  does," 


I 


38 

The  hero  of  the  Laodicean,  too,  trembles  at  one  time  because 
the  course  of  his  love  seems  to  run  too  smoothly.  But  it  is  in 
The  Hand  of  Ethelberta  that  this  feeling  finds  true  ironical 
expression:  "At  the  most  propitious  moment  the  distance  to 
the  possibility  of  sorrow  is  so  short  that  a  man's  spirits  must 
not  rise  higher  than  mere  cheerfulness  out  of  bare  respect  to 
his  insight." 

Maeterlinck  in  recognizing  this  freak  of  destiny  suggests 
three  ways  of  accepting  it.  The  Roman,  Paulus  iEmilius,  who 
has  lost  his  sons  at  the  moment  of  a  great  victory  is  glad  that 
the  arrows  of  fate  are  directed  against  him  rather  than  against 
the  state,  for  some  one  must  bear  the  brunt  of  an  inconstant 
fortune.  Job  would  have  said,  "The  Lord  gave  and  the  Lord 
hath  taken  away;  blessed  be  the  name  of  the  Lord."  Marcus 
Aurelius  would  perhaps  have  argued  that  as  he  was  no  longer 
allowed  to  love  those  whom  he  wished  to  love,  he  must  learn 
to  love  those  whom  he  did  not  love  as  yet.  It  is  needless  to 
say  that  none  of  these  solutions  would  satisfy  Hardy.  Why 
should  fortune  be  inconstant?  Why  should  the  Lord  take 
away  what  he  gives?  Why  is  there  not  some  other  way  to 
teach  me  to  love  all  men?  This  is  just  another  aspect  of  the 
caprice  that  rules  the  world.  The  butler  philosopher  Chickerel 
sums  up  all  we  know :  "I  never  believe  in  anything  that  comes 
in  the  shape  of  a  wonderful  luck.    As  it  comes,  so  it  goes." 

yxhe  idea  that  chance  rules,  that  caprice  is  everywhere, 
that  the  "inherent  will  to  enjoy"  and  the  "circumstantial  will 
against  enjoyment"  are  ever  in  conflict  lies  at  the  bottom  of 
Hardy's  philosophy.  One  would  expect,  therefore,  to  find 
many  direct  and  definite  statements  of  purposelessness.  It  is 
neither  possible  nor  necessary  to  quote  all  the  passages  which 
are  deeply  tinged  with  Hardy's  view  that  the  world  is  governed 
by  a  blind  force.  There  are  two  in  The  Return  of  the  Native 
which  are  sufficiently  characteristic  to  stand  as  delegates  for 
the  others.  "Eustacia  Vye  was  the  raw  material  of  a  divinity. 
On  Olympus  she  would  have  done  well  with  a  little  preparation. 
She  had  the  passions  and  instincts  which  make  a  faultless  god- 
dess, that  is,  those  which  make  not  quite  a  faultless  woman. 
Had  it  been  possible  for  the  earth  and  mankind  to  be  entirely 
in  her  grasp  for  a  while,  had  she  handled  the  distaff,  the  spin- 


39 

die,  and  the  shears  at  her  own  free-will,  few  in  the  world  would 
have  noticed  the  change  of  government.  There  would  have 
been  the  same  inequality  of  lot,  the  same  heaping  up  of  favors 
here,  of  contumely  there,  the  same  generosity  before  justice, 
the  same  perpetual  dilemmas,  the  same  captious  interchange  of 
caresses  and  blows,  as  those  we  endure  now."  "He  did  some- 
times think  he  had  been  ill  used  by  fortune  so  far  as  to  say  that 
to  be  born  is  a  palpable  dilemma,  and  that  instead  of  men  aim- 
ing to  advance  with  glory,  they  should  calculate  how  to  retreat 
without  shame.  But  that  he  and  his  had  been  sarcastically  and 
pitilessly  handled  in  having  such  irons  thrust  into  their  souls 
he  did  not. maintain  long.  It  is  usually  so,  except  with  the 
sternest  of  men.  The  placable  human  race,  in  its  generous  en- 
deavor to  construct  a  hypothesis  that  shall  not  degrade  a  first 
cause,  has  always  hesitated  to  conceive  a  dominant  power  of 
lower  moral  quality  than  its  own ;  and,  even  while  it  sits  down 
and  weeps  by  the  waters  of  Babylon,  invents  excuses  for  the 
oppressor  which  prompts  its  tears." 

Mr.  Archer  in  hi&Real  Conversations  quotes  a  saying  of 
Hardy :  "What  are  my  books  but  one  plea  against  'man's  in- 
humanity to  man' — to  woman-^-and  to  the  lower  animals?" 
He  goes  on  to  take  the  position  that  Maeterlinck  takes  in  Lc 
Temple  Enseveli  that  it  is  time  enough  to  talk  of  inherent  in- 
justice, when  we  have  done  away  with  the  injustice  of  men. 
Nevertheless  one  feels  inclined  to  answer  Hardy's  question  and 
say  that  his  books  are  also  a  statement  of  God's  inhumanity  to 
man.  It  is  true  that  we  feel  to  our  innermost  depths  the  ar- 
raignment of  man-made  conventions  in  Tess  and  Jude,  and  in 
lesser  fashion  in  many  of  the  other  novels  and  poems.  Con- 
ventions and  general  opinions  seem  always  to  take  the  obvious, 
and  to  leave  not  even  a  corner  for  the  more  subtle  truths. 
Therefore  these  neglected  verities  become  the  discovery  of 
artist  after  artist,  and  slowly,  oh  how  slowly,  are  forced  upon 
public  opinion.  Thus  we  see  Hardy  recognizing  in  Tess  a 
truth  that  Hawthorne  formulated  in  The  Marble  Faun,  that 
spiritual  and  mental  growth  can  come  through  sin  as  well  as 
through  innocence,*  that  all  that  is  necessary  is  that  the  spirit 
be  startled  into  life,  and  that  it  matters  not  what  startles  it. 
He  sees,  too,  another  oft-neglected  truth,  that  blackness  of  sin 
depends  upon  the  motive,  not  upon  the  result.  \  In  "The  Dance 


40 

at  the  Phoenix' '  he  turns  the  light  upon  another  spectre  which 
ought  to  teach  us  charity  but  is  too  seldom  owned  by  society, 
that  we  do  not  know  what  is  latent  in  us. 

If  this  were  all  of  Hardy's  message,  there  would  be  noth- 
ing to  separate  him  from  Ibsen,  from  Pinero,  Jones,  and  Shaw 
and  a  host  of  others  who  lay  bare  social  inconsistencies;  and 
certainly  nothing  to  connect  his  name  with  that  of  Schopen- 
hauer. It  has  been  said  that  from  his  earliest  book  Desperate 
Remedies  published  in  1870  to  his  most  recent  The  Dynasts 
there  runs  an  "ever  increasing  passion  in  the  doubt  or  denial 
of  the  goodness  of  God."  At  the  bottom  of  the  gloominess 
Hardy  so  often  finds  in  nature,  of  the  cruelty  of  her  laws,  of 
her  sympathy  with  man's  more  ignoble  aims,  at  the  bottom 
of  man's  restlessness,  of  his  wish  he  had  never  been  born,  of 
his  indifference  to  a  history  that  tells  only  of  pain  and  unful- 
filled intentions,  of  his  indifference  to  religion;  at;the  bottom 
of  his  expectation  of  ill,  and  his  general  sense  of  the  unex- 
plained and  undemanded  existence  of  evil,  there  is  always  the 
thought  of  uselessness.  If  we  knew  any  one  profited,  even  if 
we  knew  that  some  vengeful  god  were  full  of  mirth  at  our 
misery,  we  could  grimly  endure;  but  all  that  we  can  discover 
from  the  facts  of  the  case  is  that  some  power  which  is  either 
blind,  or  automatic,  or  both,  has  set  in  motion  a  world  whose 
basic  note  is  pain.  No  one  can  question  the  omnipotence  of 
such  a  power,  but  of  its  benevolence  what  can  be  said? 

Schopenhauer  says  it  is  not  benevolent.  There  is  no  har- 
mony in  existence.  It  is  the  frank  statement  of  this  lack  of 
harmony  that  makes  him  a  new  note  in  occidental  philosophy. 
Hardy  is  equally  outspoken  through  the  medium  of  novel, 
poem  and  play.  There  is  no  reason  why.  Things  are  simply 
unarranged  and  unreasonable.  The  two  men  are  not  entirely 
alike  in  the  details  of  their  problem,  not  at  all  alike  in  their 
solution,  they  are  alike  in  starting  from  the  same  basis,  the 
basis  of  utter  purposelessness.  It  might  be  possible  to  parallel 
many  a  passage  in  Schopenhauer,  with  a  like  one  in  Hardy. 
Such  a  process  is  neither  entertaining  nor  entirely  trustworthy. 
It  savors  too  much  of  seeing  what  we  want  to  see.  But  with- 
out unduly  stretching  the  material  to  fit  the  theory,  it  is  possi- 
ble to  say  that  they  are  alike  in  the  spirit  which  drives  them  to 
utterance,  ?  ! 


CHAPTER  III. 
Effect  of  Purposelessness  :  Tragedy. 

If  Schopenhauer  and  Hardy  have  departed  from  the  gen- 
eral run  of  men  in  regarding  the  whole  of  life  as  purposeless, 
what  effect  will  this  have  upon  their  view  of  life  as  we  see 
it  in  events  and  actions?  Obviously  there  will  be  a  change 
of  values.  What  seems  important  to  men  who  see  each  deed 
and  each  occurrence  as  parts  of  a  purposive  whole,  may  seem 
worthless  to  them.  Nowhere  will  this  shifting  of  values  be  so 
evident  as  in  a  consideration  of  what  they  regard  as  tragic.  So 
the  three  questions  of  what  is  the  more  usual  view  of  tragedy, 
what  constitutes  a  tragedy  for  Schopenhauer,  what  is  used  as 
a  tragedy  by  Hardy  become  all-important. 

The  essence  of  tragedy  is  conflict  The  old  definition  that 
tragedy  represents  the  triumph  of  the  universal  over  the  par- 
ticular still  suffices,  although  we  have  many  times  changed  the 
meaning  of  universal.  If  we  give  to  it  the  meaning  we  have 
found  in  Schopenhauer  and  Hardy,  then  the  universal  is  a 
blind  irrationality  for  which  no  laws  can  be  given,  no  predic- 
tions made.)  It  will  strike  where  it  will  strike,  here  with  dire 
results,  there  with  good,  (it  is  of  course  the  dire  results  which 
concern  us.  Obviously  the  particular  who  encounters  this 
universal  will  be  an  object  of  pity,  not  one  of  blame.  Indeed 
there  is  no  tragedy  in  what  our  writers  would  call  the  deeper 
sense  of  the  word,  as  long  as  the  individual  is  able  to  help  him- 
self. Tragedy  enters  only  when  the  individual  has  reached  the 
limit  of  his  power  of  resistance  to  evil,  and  is  blameless.  Thus, 
in  this  tragedy  the  universal  takes  things  into  its  own  hands, 
whereas  in  the  other  the  individual  took  the  initiative.  ,  Pity  of 
a  certain  sort  one  always  had  for  the  individual,  but  it  was  the 
pity  for  those  who  make  mistakes,  the  pity  for  the  sinner ;  now 
it  is  the  pity  for  those  who  are  sinned  against.  Like  our  pity, 
our  terror  has  changed  its  nature.  Formerly  it  was  definite,  we 
feared  the  rewards  and  punishments  which  would  surely  fol- 
low ;  now  we  scarcely  know  what  we  fear,  we  call  it  the  lack  of 

(41) 


42 

justice.  Like  the  new  pity  this  terror  has  the  tinge  of  ironic 
bitterness.  As  we  can  no  longer  blame  the  individual,  and  as 
we  must  have  one  side  right  or  wrong  to  produce  a  conflict, 
we  transfer  our  protest  to  the  universal.  And  it  is  in  the  sense 
that  we  know  nothing  of  the  morality  of  this  universal,  and 
from  what  we  see  can  only  conclude  it  is  less  high  than  our 
own,  that  the  full  poignancy  of  this  tragedy  is  felt. 

With  the  Greeks,  the  more  usual  form  of  tragedy  pre- 
vailed. Man  was  in  conflict  with  Fate,  but  it  was  an  optimis- 
tic conflict,  because  Fate  was  law-abiding.  Among  themselves 
the  gods  had  laws,  it  was  when  man  came  into  opposition  with 
these  that  he  fell  into  tragedy.  Men  recognized  that  they  were 
victims  of  Chance,  but  they  did  not  think  of  her  as  powerless 
and  blind.  W.  L.  Courtney  in  some  essays  on  The  Idea  of 
Tragedy  says  that  originally  the  Greeks,  like  the  Hebrews, 
thought  of  their  gods  as  jealous  of  human  happiness,  and 
of  fate  as  something  inexorable  and  rigid,  which  made  men 
its  sport ;  but  that  yEschylus,  realizing  that  these  views  would 
interfere  with  the  dramatic  interest,  modified  them.  His  fate 
is  not  the  implacable  thing,  Adrasteia,  but  Nemesis,  the 
apportioner,  the  power  which  allots  to  every  man  according 
to  his  deserts.  Man  excites  the  ire  of  the  gods,  not  their 
jealousy.  We  know,  too,  that  Aristotle  did  not  recognize  as 
a  true  tragic  hero  the  good  man  who  came  from  prosperity 
into  adversity.  His  true  hero  must  contain  within  him  a  mix- 
ture of  good  and  bad. 

In  the  great  era  of  Elizabethan  tragedy  God  takes  the 
place  of  Fate.  His  decrees  or  the  general  moral  sense  of  men 
forms  the  universal,  the  individual  Lear  or  Tamburlaine  who 
puts  himself  into  antagonism  with  these  decrees  must  bear  the 
penalty.  Fate,  however,  is  enthroned  within  man  rather  than 
on  some  high  point  without.  Both  the  particular  will  which  is 
rebelling,  and  the  universal  moral  laws  which  must  triumph 
are  within  the  same  man.  He  helps  form  the  universal,  he 
does  not  find  it  ready  formed  as  in  the  old  Grecian  days.  Ham- 
let's tragedy  takes  place  within  his  own  soul. 

In  our  own  day  tragedy  like  everything  else,  seems  com- 
plex and  many-sided.  With  the  growing  belief  that  all  cri- 
teria of  right  and  wrong  are  within  man  and  not  in  some  god 


y 

43 

without,  there  has  been  an  intensification  of  the  struggle 
within  the  individual.  Two  opposing  forces  meet  in  the  same 
person,  one  may  be  the  conventional  sense  of  right,  one  a 
more  fundamental  instinct,  as  in  Ibsen's  The  Doll's  House: 
or  one  may  be  the  narrow  selfish  side  of  a  man,  the  other  his 
wider,  freer  self,  as  in  The  Master  Builder.  This  has  drawn 
tragedy  to  realism,  because  it  is  in  everyday  humdrum  life  that 
we  find  these  struggles  the  fiercest.  There  is  also  a  tragedy 
that  has  taken  the  form  6f  symbolism  as  in  Maeterlinck's  The 
Blind,  Joyzelle,  and  The  Seven  Princesses.  And  there  is  an- 
other view  of  tragedy  which  is  not  distinct  from  the  tragedy  / 
of  realism  or  that  of  symbolism,  but  is  distinct  from  the  Gre-/ 
cian  idea  of  Nemesis  and  the  Elizabethan  idea  of  the  surety' 
of  the  moral  triumph.  This  view  is  that  in  the  majority  of 
cases  the  good  are  rewarded  and  the  wicked  punished,  but  that 
there  are  exceptions  where  the  just  man  suffers  and  the  wicked 
man  goes  scot  free,  and  that  these  exceptions  form  a  special  and 
particular  kind  of  tragedy.  Aristotle's  true  tragic  hero  is  no 
longer  the  only  hero,  he  has  had  to  admit  into  the  arena  the 
Job-like  man  who  has  fallen  from  prosperity  into  adversity. 

All  three  of  these  elements  of  tragedy  enter  into  Hardy. 
He  is  the  realist  who  finds  his  tragedies  in  his  own  Wessex 
and  among  the  problems  that  press  upon  us  to-day.  He  may 
often  wish  that  he  had  lived  in  the  Middle  Ages  when  belief 
was  everywhere  prevalent  and  doubts  had  not  arisen,  but  he  \  - 
cannot  humor  himself  with  the  relief  of  living  imaginatively 
in  such  a  time.  He  is  no  shirker,  and  he  must  face  the  un- 
pleasant to-day  with  only  a  lingering  wish  that  he  could  have 
had  his  lot  cast  in  a  happier  and  less  strenuous  time. '  Symbol- 
ism on  the  whole  finds  little  place  in  his  work.  He  is  usually 
matter-of-fact  and  direct  in  telling  what  he  means;  but,  aside 
from  the  symbolic  use  which  he  often  makes  of  nature,  there 
is  in  The  Dynasts  the  double  set  of  antagonists,  the  aggressing 
Napoleon  and  the  righteous  defenders  of  the  peace  of  Europe, 
and  back  of  them  the  impotence  of  man  and  the  compelling 
force  of  the  Immanent  Will.  As  to  dealing  with  the  exceptional 
man  who  receives  more  than  he  merits,  it  is  true  that  Hardy 
does  that,  but  the  vital  point  is  whether  he  would  admit  that 
they  were  very  exceptional ;  or  granted  that  they  are,  whether 


r 


44 

one  exception  would  not  prove  the  point  against  purposive- 
ness  as  well  as  a  majority  of  cases. 

People  to-day  do  not  doubt  that  we  can  undeservedly  suf- 
fer. Maeterlinck,  who  is  the  best  and  deepest  kind  of  an 
optimist,  says,  "I  do  not  pretend  that  destiny  is  just,  that  it  re- 
wards the  good  and  punishes  the  wicked,"  and  in  Le  Temple 
Enseveli,  he  shows  that  there  is  grossest  injustice  in  visiting 
the  sins  of  the  fathers  upon  the  children,  since  no  account  is 
taken  of  the  motive  that  caused  the  sin,  and  a  disease  con- 
tracted in  an  act  of  heroism  may  be  transmitted  as  quickly  as 
one  caught  in  a  selfish  career  of  vice.  But  most  people  are  not 
willing  to  go  as  far  as  Schopenhauer  and  say  that  life  in  itself 
is  the  worst  form  of  undeserved  suffering.  In  a  sense  the 
world's  greatest  tragedies,  though  not  always  its  greatest 
dramas,  are  those  in  which  the  victim  is  clearly  in  the  right,  or 
those  in  which  both  sides  think  they  are  right.  The  great 
dramas  of  Christ  and  of  Prometheus  are  of  the  first  order; 
all  religious  persecutions,  all  civil  wars  like  our  own  great 
Rebellion  and  the  Revolution  of  1789  in  France  are  of  the 
second.  In  both  these  cases,  you  have  men  who  are  willing  to 
die  for  the  right  they  see,  who  triumph  even  in  their  defeat, 
because  they  represent  the  universal.  But  the  Schopenhauerian 
hero  does  not  die  because  he  finds  something  worth  dying 
for,  but  because  he  finds  "nothing  worth  living  for."  What 
life  would  teach  all  men  if  they  had  ears  to  hear,  the  victim 
of  tragedy  is  forced  to  learn.  More  quickly  than  his  brethren 
he  comes  to  the  realization  that  all  is  futile  in  a  world  con- 
structed like  this  one. 

Tragedy,  says  Schopenhauer,  is  to  be  regarded  as  the 
summit  of  poetical  art.  It  is  significant  that  this  highest  poeti- 
cal achievement  represents  the  terrible  side  of  life.  "The 
unspeakable  pain,  the  wail  of  humanity,  the  triumph  of  evil, 
the  scornful  mastery  of  chance,  and  the  irretrievable  fall  of 
the  just  and  innocent"  are  all  the  subject  matter  of  tragedy. 
At  last  the  noblest  men,  purified  by  suffering,  renounce  the 
ends  they  have  striven  for,  and  renounce  the  pleasures  of  life. 
They  have  learned  their  lesson  of  the  nature  of  the  world,  and 
the  futility  of  striving  against  it.  "The  demand  for  so-called 
poetical   justice,"   continues    Schopenhauer,    "rests   on   entire 


45 

misconception  of  the  nature  of  tragedy,  and,  indeed,  of  the 
nature  of  the  world  itself."  He  asks  in  what  Ophelia,  Desde- 
mona  and  Cordelia  have  offended.  "The  true  sense  of  tragedy 
is  the  deeper  insight  that  it  is  not  his  own  individual  sins  that 
the  hero  atones  for,  but  original  sin,  that  is,  the  crime  of  exist- 
ence itself;  'for  the  greatest  crime  of  man  is  that  he  was 
born' ;  as  Calderon  expresses  it." 

Schopenhauer  distinguishes  three  kinds  of  tragedy. 
Those  that  deal  with  a  character  of  extraordinary  wickedness, 
such  as  Iago,  or  Richard  III ;  those  which  portray  blind  fate, 
chance,  and  error,  as  the  GEdipus  Rex"  of  Sophocles,  and  last 
and  nearest  to  us,  those  that  are  brought  about  by  simple 
juxtaposition  of  ordinary  characters.  No  one  is  specially  to 
blame;  trifling  accidents,  innocent  acts  bring  about  great  en- 
tanglements. In  The  Woodlanders  Giles  Winterborne  refuses 
to  turn  his  heavily  loaded  team  out  of  the  road  for  the  pas- 
sage of  the  haughty  Felice  Charmond.  This  sows  in  her  mind 
the  prejudice  that  makes  her  refuse  to  allow  Giles  to  renew  his 
right  to  the  houses,  a  right  lost  by  the  merest  chance.  This 
refusal  causes  him  to  lose  Grace,  and  in  the  end  causes  Felice 
to  lose  Dr.  Fitzpiers,  because  he  has  married  Grace.  Such  a": 
chain  of  incidents  conveys  the  force  of  Schopenhauer's  remark 
that  this  kind  of  tragedy  is  so  near  and  horrible  and  sinister  as 
to  make  us  feel  ourselves  already  in  the  midst  of  hell.  J 

Schopenhauer,  then,  would  not  for  a  moment  admit  that 
the  man  who  failed  to  be  rewarded  or  punished  according  to 
his  deserts  was  exceptional.  A  lack  of  poetic  justice  is  a 
necessary  correlative  of  a  world  composed  of  irrational  will 
and  its  manifestations ;  but  the  truly  tragic  lies  in  the  general  * 
recognition  of  the  lack  of  justice  in  life  as  a  whole,  and  not  in 
any  given  case.  This  idea  that  it  is  only  the  pain  of  all  life  and 
not  any  individual  pain  which  is  tragic,  is  a  favorite  one  with 
Schopenhauer,  and  is  repeated  in  many  of  his  minor  essays. 
The  given  case  is  important  only  because  it  shows  the  nature 
of  every  case.  The  entire  trend  of  life  is  tragic.  We  see 
merely  in  the  glare  of  the  search-light  what  we  could  see  any- 
where. 

Our  first  cursory  thought  about  Thomas  Hardy  is  that 
he  has  gone  back  to  the  Greek  idea  of  tragedy.     Man  and 


S 


T 


46 

Fate,  seem  pitted  against  each  other,  and  Fate  is  the  stronger. 
There  is  the  closing  sentence  in  Tess  to  confirm  this  idea. 
"7ustice' .was  done,  and  the  President  of  the  Immortals  (in 
^Eschylean  phrase)  had  ended  his  sport  with  Tess."  But  as 
we  have  seen  in  "Hap"  man  is  not  even  so  dignified  as  to  be 
the  sport  of  the  gods,  he  is  an  utterly  useless  factor  in  a  blind 
scheme.  So  a  second  thought  tells  us  that  nothing  ever  recurs 
in  exactly  the  same  form.  Life  is  like  the  river  of  Heraclitus, 
and  we  cannot  step  twice  into  the  same  stream.  If  Hardy 
and  other  writers  of  our  time  center  their  dramas  about  des- 
tiny we  may  be  very  sure  it  will  not  be  the  same  Destiny  who 
dwelt  with  the  Greeks. 

Maeterlinck  in  discussing  the  fact  that  the  drama  of  to- 
day has  turned  to  the  regions  of  psychology  and  of  moral  prob- 
lems, says,  "There  is  no  longer  a  God  to  widen,  or  master,  the 
action;  nor  is  there  an  inexorable  fate  to  form  a  mysterious, 
solemn  and  tragical  background  for  the  slightest  gesture  of 
man."  "There  still  abides  with  us,  it  is  true,  a  terrible  un- 
known." This  unknown  he  finds  within  man  and  Hardy 
without  man.  That  seems  to  be  in  reality,  the  sole  kinship 
between  the  latter's  idea  of  destiny  and  that  of  the  Greeks,  that 
the  two  opposing  forces  are  man  and  a  power  outside  him. 
This  fact  that  Hardy  is  an  innovator,  that  he  has  reversed  the 
traditions  of  tragedy  both  in  our  drama  and  in  our  novel  is, 
perhaps,  best  understood  by  a  comparison  of  three  dramatic 
productions  which  have  the  same  theme,  the  suffering  of  the 
innocent. 

In  Antigone,  the  Duchess  of  Malfi,  and  Tess,  we  have 
three  women  who  did  not  merit  the  accumulation  of  horrors 
that  came  to  them.  Fortune  was  most  unjust  to  each  of  the 
three,  with  that  worst  kind  of  injustice  which  takes  no  account 
of  the  spirit  and  motives  of  the  victims.  For  these  women 
were  all  innocent  with  the  deepest  innocence,  the  pureness  of 
heart  that  not  only  shall  see  God,  but  does  see  Him.  They  are 
among  those  who  most  wring  our  hearts,  the  unfortunate,  the 
ill-fated  ones  who  draw  misfortune  to  them  as  the  magnet 
draws  the  iron.  But  in  the  nature  of  the  fate  that  overtook 
them,  there  is  the  most  essential,  the  most  vital  distinction. 

Their   doom   was   unwarranted   by  their   deeds,   it   was 


47 

lacking  in  all  higher  justice;  yet  Antigone  and  the  Duchess 
had  a  hand  in  their  fate.  They  chose  their  course,  pitted  them- 
selves against  destiny,  went  into  the  conflict  with  their  eyes 
open;  whereas  Tess  was  an  unsuspicious  victim,  seized  in  her 
innocence  by  malicious  circumstances.  Never  did  she  dare  **** 
fate,  never  did  she  have  the  satisfaction  of  fighting,  even  in  a 
losing  cause.  Antigone  knew  when  she  chose  to  bury  her 
brother,  that  she  chose  her  own  doom.  She  knew  she  trans- 
gressed the  law  of  the  ruler  of  the  state;  she  preferred  to  be 
true  to  the  law  of  the  goas.  Perhaps  she  expected  a  miracle, 
that  Creon  would  relent,  or  the  gods  she  served  would  inter- 
vene; but  she  knew  what  could  happen,  and  what  would  most 
probably  come  to  pass,  and  she  advanced  open-eyed  and  cour- 
ageous to  her  doom.  The  Duchess,  too,  chose  openly.  She 
knew  when  she  made  offers  of  marriage  to  Antonio  that  she 
invoked  the  sure  enmity  of  her  brothers,  and  took  not  only  her 
own  life,  but  that  of  her  lover  in  her  hands.  Tess  is  the  vic- 
tim of  a  shiftless  family,  who  prey  upon  her  sensibilities,  and 
drive  her  forth  to  the  house  of  her  rich  relations  where  her  fate 
lies  in  wait  for  her.  Of  course  she  could  have  resisted  her 
fate.  Tess  has  her  weaknesses.  Her  power  of  resistance  is 
not  adamantine.  If  it  were  not  for  this  weak  side  in  her,  she 
would  deserve  the  criticism  Lionel  Johnson  makes  of  her,  that 
she  is  so  blameless  as  to  be  uninteresting.  It  is  the  feeling 
that  though  ninety-nine  girls  with  Tess's  heredity,  her  en- 
vironment, and  her  temptations  would  have  yielded  as  she 
yielded,  there  might  have  been  one  who  would  have  seen  the 
way  of  avoidance  of  all  these  difficulties,  which  makes  her  lot 
so  tragic.  Tess's  exceptionalness  consists  not  in  wise  fore- 
sight, but  in  another  virtue;  she  can  pass  through  sin  and^/" 
degradation  and  come  out  undefiled. 

It  may  be  said  that  Tess  transgressed  a  law  of  society, 
as  the  Duchess  a  conventional  law  and  Antigone  one  of  the 
state,  and  that  each  simply  met  with  the  penalty  of  her  trans- 
gression; but  it  was  never  given  to  Tess  to  choose  whether 
she  would  transgress  or  not.  She  did  not  risk  defiance  of  a  * 
social  code  for  the  sake  of  something  dearer  in  the  shape  of 
pleasure  or  duty,  as  these  two  did,  or  as  Monna  Vanna  did. 
Her  tragedy  fell  upon  her  with  no  invitation  from  herself, 


48 

and  brought  no  compensation.  So  our  pity  for  Antigone  and 
for  the  Duchess  is  tempered  with  a  kind  of  glory  in  their  dar- 
ing, our  pity  for  Tess  has  no  alleviation.  They  are  conquerors, 
they  are  subdued,  but  triumphant;  Tess  is  a  victim,  she  is 
crushed. 

Antigone,  indeed,  is  among  our  grandly  heroic  figures. 
Maeterlinck  classes  her  among  the  sages,  and  calls  her  drama 
the  drama  of  wisdom,  of  which  there  are  few  examples  in  the 
world.  For  Antigone  defied  bad  fortune  for  the  sake  of  a 
duty,  she  was  the  sacrifice  to  all  she  held  to  be  holy  and  in- 
violable in  a  sister's  relation  to  a  brother.  Where  the  Duchess 
ventured  all  for  the  sake  of  her  own  love  and  happiness,  Anti- 
gone yielded  even  her  love  and  happiness  to  the  call  of  the 
highest  in  her.  "Thy  choice  was  to  live;  mine  to  die,"  says 
she  to  her  sister.  "One  world  approved  thy  wisdom ;  another, 
mine."  There  is  all  that  is  glorious,  and  nothing  that  is  hope- 
less in  the  fate  of  Antigone,  for  it  was  given  to  her  to  find 
something  that  was  worth  dying  for.  The  Duchess,  too, 
though  the  path  of  noble  self-sacrifice  is  not  her  lot,  dies  like 
a  Duchess,  full  of  pride,  dignity  and  a  willingness  to  pay  for 
the  happiness  she  has  bought.  But  Tess  dies  an  ignoble 
death  after  a  few  paltry  days  of  happiness  with  Angel  Clare, 
days  for  which  she  has  paid  again  and  again  in  former 
agonies  of  sorrow.  She  dies  gladly  because  it  is  better  to  go 
before  she  awakes  from  her  dream,  before  Angel  learns  to 
despise  her.  Never  has  death  seemed  repulsive,  but  life  has 
always  sung  in  her  ears  the  refrain,  "It  would  be  better  not 
to  be  born."  How  truly  might  it  be  said  of  her  that  she  found 
"nothing  worth  living  for!" 

It  is  in  them  all  to  question  the  decrees  of  the  gods. 
They  know  that  their  fate  is  undeserved,  and  being  one  and 
all  women  of  spirit,  they  must  ask  why  it  should  come  to 
them.  Antigone  and  Tess  have  a  right  to  a'  more  subtle  form 
of  questioning  than  the  Duchess,  who  has  only  her  own  misery 
to  account  for,  whose  woes  start  with  herself.  The  others 
may  indeed  ask  why  they  should  be  involved  in  the  deeds  of 
their  forefathers?  Why  the  descendants  of  (Edipus  should 
perish  for  his  unwitting  sins,  and  why  this  daughter  of  the 
house  of  D'Urberville   should  be   cursed   with   their  weak- 


49 

nesses  are  questions  for  the  high  gods  of  justice.  Antigone 
questions  like  a  Greek.  We  cannot  avoid  the  decrees  of 
fate,  we  cannot  explain  them,  we  must  simply  submit  to  them. 
Inexorable  and  inscrutable  are  the  ways  of  the  gods.  "And 
what  law  of  heaven  have  I  transgressed?  Why,  hapless  one, 
should  I  look  to  the  gods  any  more, — what  ally  should  I  in- 
voke,— when  by  piety  I  have  earned  the  name  of  impious? 
Nay,  then,  if  these  things  are  pleasing  to  the  gods,  when  I 
have  suffered  my  doom,  ]7shall  come  to  know  my  sin;  but  if 
the  sin  is  with  my  judges,  I  could  wish  them  no  fuller  meas- 
ure of  evil  than  they,  on  their  part,  mete  wrongfully  to  me." 
The  Duchess  of  Malfi  is  even  more  submissive : 

"Must  I,  like  to  a  slave-born  Russian, 
Account  it  praise  to  suffer  tyranny? 
And  yet,  O  heaven,  thy  heavy  hand  is  in't ! 
I  have  seen  my  little  boy  oft  scourge  his  top 
And  compared  myself  to't :  naught  made  me  e'er 
Go  right  but  heaven's  scourge-stick. " 

And  though  she  learns  to  curse  the  stars,  and  the  world  to 
its  first  chaos,  she  never  rebels  against  the  general  injustice 
that  could  allow  such  a  life  as  hers  to  be  so  maimed.  Tess, 
however,  does  see  her  tragedy  as  part  of  a  whole  world  of 
suffering,  and  not  as  an  isolated  case.  She  has  compassion 
on  the  wounded  birds  after  her  sorrowful  night  in  the  wood, 
because  they  are  in  worse  plight  than  herself,  since  she  is 
whole.  She  feels  her  general  insignificance,  that  she  is  of  no 
more  consequence  than  a  fly;  she  sees  the  unfairness  of  her 
situation,  that  it  has  not  been  in  her  power — "nor  is  it  in 
anybody's  power — to  feel  the  whole  truth  of  golden  opin- 
ions when  it  is  possible  to  profit  by  them" ;  and  she  realizes 
that  she  has  not  merited  her  judgment.  "Never  in  her  life 
— she  could  swear  it  from  the  bottom  of  her  soul —  had  she 
intended  to  do  wrong;  yet  these  hard  judgments  had  come. 
Whatever  her  sins,  they  were  not  sins  of  intention,  but  of 
inadvertence,  and  why  should  she  have  been  punished  so 
persistently?"  She  has  ^earned  that  there  is  an  element  in  the 
world  with  which  we  can  not  reckon,  because  it  is  not  law- 
abiding,  as  we  are  law-abiding.  "Brute  chance"  met  her,  and 
"brute  chance"  won. 


I  / 


50 

W.  L.  Cross,  in  his  Development  of  the  English  Novel, 
has  this  to  say  of  Thomas  Hardy:  "Tess  of  the  D'Urber- 
villes,  his  mightiest  production,  is  a  tragedy  that  at  no  period 
in  our  history  other  than  these  fin  de  siecle  days  could  have 
been  written;  or,  if  written,  could  have  been  understood." 
The  reason  for  such  a  statement  is  that  in  this  novel,  as  in 
so  many  of  his  others,  we  get  the  conflicts  that  are  not  "sig- 
nificant," and  perhaps  never  before  in  the  western  world,  were 
we  so  bold  in  challenging  their  insignificance.  Professor 
Royce,  in  his  Spirit  of  Modern  Philosophy,  has  pointed  out 
the  distinction  between  tragedies  that  are  significant  and  those 
that  are  not,  and  has  admirably  summed  up  just  the  side  of 
life  the  Hardy  novels  show.  "The  worst  tragedy  of  the  world 
is  the  tragedy  of  the  brute  chance  to  which  everything 
spiritual  seems  to  be  subject  among  us — the  tragedy  of  the 
diabolical  irrationality  of  so  many  among  the  foes  of  what- 
/''  ever  is  significant.  An  open  enemy  you  can  face.  The 
temptation  to  do  evil  is  indeed  a  necessity  for  spirituality. 
But  one's  own  foolishness,  one's  ignorance,  the  cruel  accidents 
of  disease,  the  fatal  misunderstandings  that  part  friends  and 
lovers,  the  chance  mistakes  that  wreckf  nations: — these  things 
we  lament  most  bitterly,  not  because  they  are  painful,  but 
because  they  are  farcical^  distracting— not  foemen  worthy  of  c 
the  sword  of  the  spirit,  nor  yet  mere  pangs  of  our  finitude  \ 
that  we  can  easily  learn  to  face  courageously,  as  one  can  be  I 
indifferent  to  physical  pain.  No,  these  things  do  not  make  * 
life  merely  painful  to  us ;  they  make  it  hideously  petty.  They 
are  like  the  "mean  knights"  that  beat  down  Launcelot  during 
his  hopeless  wandering  in  search  of  the  Grail." 

These  insignificant  conflicts,  then,  these  intrusions  of 
the  mechanical  world  into  the  world  of  spirit,  these  blind 
irrationalities,  are  "the  door  to  which  Thomas  Hardy  finds  no 
key."  With  this  admission,  there  throng  about  us  a  whole  host 
of  unanswered  questions.  Does  he  mean  that  this  is  a  general 
condition  of  life  or  an  occasional  one?  Does  he  consistently 
present  this  view?  Does  he  do  it  from  artistic  motives  or 
from  those  of  belief?  Is  he  true  to  life  in  so  emphasizing 
one  side  of  it  ?  Is  there  some  obvious  solution  to  such  seeming 
ironies,  which  he  fails  to  perceive? 


5i 

Mr.  Hardy  so  definitely  says,  in  the  Real  Conversations, 
reported  by  Mr.  William  Archer,  that  it  is  better  not  to  be 
born,  and  that  life  is  incomplete  and  grotesque,  "bounded, 
circumscribed,  cabin'd,  cribb'd,  confin'd,"  that  it  is  evident 
he  regards  all  life  as  a  tragedy.  If  life  in  itself  is  tragic,  then 
the  particular  tragedy  is  not  different  in  substance  from  the 
others,  it  only  happens  to  be  more  dramatic.  There  is  just 
a  hint  of  humanitarian  feeling  here.  We  no  longer  look  upon 
our  lives  as  exceptional  m  individual  things,  but  as  parts  of 
a  great  whole.  More  and  more  to-day  are  we  coming  to  say 
and  to  think,  even  if  we  do  not  live  up  to  it,  that  all  men  are 
brothers.  Schopenhauer's  system  included  the  whole  world 
under  the  self.  If  all  mankind  are  linked  together  by  suffering, 
then  my  suffering  is  typical,  but  not  peculiar.  Elizabeth  Jane, 
when  she  had  reached  a  position  where  lighter-natured  girls 
would  have  been  happy,  remains  merely  tranquil.  "But  her 
strong  sense  that  neither  she  nor  any  human  being  deserved 
less  than  was  given,  did  not  blind  her  to  the  fact  that  there 
were  others  receiving  less  who  had  deserved  much  more. 
And  in  being  forced  to  class  herself  among  the  fortunate  she 
did  not  cease  to  wonder  at  the  persistence  of  the  unforeseen, 
when  the  one  to  whom  such  unbroken  tranquillity  had  been 
accorded  in  the  adult  stage  was  she  whose  youth  had  seemed 
to  teach  that  happiness  was  but  the  occasional  episode  in  a 
general  drama  of  pain." 

But  even  if  the  one  case  were  peculiar  and  unusual,  the 
charge  of  irrationality  is  still  maintained.  If  the  one  per- 
fectly innocent  and  righteous  person  can  meet  with  the  calami- 
ties that  overtook  Tess,  or  the  petty  hardships  that  came  to 
Elizabeth  Jane,  then  the  law  of  justice  needs  revision.  A  hun- 
dred cases  will  not  make  the  need  more  apparent,  because  we 
can  see  no  reason  why  this  law,  which  has  the  possibility  of 
perfection  should  err.  Omnipotence  and  Benevolence  surely 
have  the  ability  to  create  a  world  without  error  and  unfair- 
ness, yet  every  day  shows  us  error  and  unfairness.  Herein  lies 
our  tragedy.  Maeterlinck  takes  as  the  theme  of  one  of  his 
essays  that  moment  when  the  civilized  world  watches  the  issue 
between  Edward  VII  of  England  and  the  destiny  that 
threatens  to  rob  him  of  life  at  the  very  moment  when  he  has 


52 

attained,  presumably,  his  heart's  desire.  He  calls  it,  "the 
essential  tragedy  of  man,  of  the  universal  and  perpetual  drama 
enacted  between  his  feeble  will  and  the  enormous  unknown 
force  that  encompasses  him."  This  particular  instance  is 
typical  of  the  drama  which  has  unfolded  itself  every  day  since 
life  first  began,  and  it  gives  us  a  chance  to  compare  our  dif- 
ferent ways  of  viewing  it.  Some  saw  in  it  an  incensed  Provi- 
dence chastising  the  pride  of  man.  "But,"  says  Maeterlinck, 
in  words  which  Hardy  might  have  used,  "why  does  this  God, 
more  perfect  than  men,  ask  of  us  what  a  perfect  man  would 
not  ask  ?"  Others  saw  in  it  the  wretchedness  and  insignificance 
of  man.  He  himself  saw  the  victory  of  science,  one  more  cer- 
tainty was  added  to  the  sum  of  certainties  in  the  world, 
one  more  point  was  wrested  from  the  unknown.  The  imper- 
fect world  and  the  perfect  God,  there  is  the  irreconcilable  par- 
adox. And  it  makes  no  difference  whether  an  incident  like 
that  of  Edward  VII  is  unique  and  exceptional,  or  whether 
they  have  been  of  daily  occurrence  since  the  world  first  came 
into  existence;  the  paradox  is  apparent  in  either  case. 

So  it  is  the  ironic  side  of  life  that  Hardy  deals  with.  Evo- 
lution has  been  no  easy  doctrine  for  any  one.  Nature's  gran- 
diose methods,  her  prodigality,  her  absolute  carelessness  of 
the  individual  depress  the  individual,  man.  Man's  indifference 
to  other  men,  his  lack  of  charity  to  his  kind,  add  to  that  im- 
pression. We  look  beyond  man  and  nature  for  some  guardian 
angel  who  shall  recompense  us  with  some  strength  or  some 
faith,  and  there  is  nothing  that  can  satisfy  our  reason.  All 
the  proofs  point  to  a  power  which  takes  no  account  of  us. 
This  is  so  hard  and  bitter  a  truth;  it  is  so  incomprehensible 
that  a  God-loving  man  should  not  find  a  man-loving  God, 
that  men  have  not  faced  it.  Here  is  a  man  who  does  face  it, 
who  devotes  all  his  art  to  showing  this  most  seamy  side  of 
life.  The  "joy  of  life"  which  intoxicated  the  world  of  Eliza- 
beth is  a  thing  unknown  to  the  world  of  Thomas  Hardy.  At 
the  most  you  will  have  pleasurable  episodes,  moderate  tran- 
quillity, an  occasional  giddy  ■  hour  of  forgetfulness.  The 
things  that  come  to  us  when  our  first  fresh  desire  for  them  has 
become  stale,  the  things  that  we  must  renounce,  the  things  we 
should  have  and  do  not  get,  the  things  we  do  get  and  should 


53 

not  have,  these  will  be  the  themes  of  our  writer.  A  typical 
illustration  is  the  collection  of  short  stories  called  "Life's  Little 
Ironies."  There  is  not  one  person  in  the  series  of  tales  that 
gets  what  he  wants,  yet  not  one  who  wants  anything  that  is 
unreasonable,  and  not  one  who  misses  his  happiness  by  any 
plotted  wickedness  or  villainy.  A  few  mistakes,  a  blunder  or 
two,  and  lives  are  spoiled.  If  happiness  were  far  off,  if  these 
characters  never  glimpsed  it,  there  would  be  no  ground  of 
complaint ;  but  they  one'  and  all  see  it ;  one  and  all  miss  it. 
The  merest  trifling  change  and  all  would  be  so  different,  and 
therein  lies  the  irony. 

There  are  two  ways  of  realizing  that  Hardy  gives  us  the 
character  of  defeat*  rather  than  the  character  of  victory;  the 
man  who  endures,  rather  than  the  man  who  triumphs,  either 
with  an  inner  or  an  outer  triumph.  If  we  look  through  the 
titles  of  his  novels  for  those  that  are  satisfactory  in  the  sense 
in  which  a  Dickens  novel  is  satisfactory,  where  the  neglected 
and  deserving  ones  are  rewarded  and  the  bad  ones  are  dis- 
covered and  punished,  and  the  world  is  ruled  as  we  like  to 
see  it  ruled,  only  three  can  by  any  possibility  occur  to  us, 
Under  the  Greenwood  Tree,  The  Trumpet  Major,  and  A 
Laodicean.  Of  these  three  The  Trumpet  Major  gives  only 
momentary  gratification.  To  be  sure  one  does  lay  it  down 
with  that  feeling  of  being  soothed  and  refreshed  which  is 
altogether  pleasing  in  these  days  of  the  problem  play  and  the 
problem  novel,  but  that  is  because  of  its  idyllic  charm,  a  charm 
unbroken  by  any  digression  into  the  fields  of  gloomy  specula- 
tion. A  moment's  reflection,  however,  shows  us  the  grim 
spectre  of  irony  in  the  background.  It  is  summed  up  in  the 
words  of  Anne.  "No  one  loves  me  so  well  as  you,  John; 
nobody  in  the  world  is  so  worthy  to  be  loved ;  and  yet  I  cannot 
anyhow  love  you  rightly."  Bob  is  not  worthy  of  Anne,  John 
is  too  worthy ;  yet  it  is  the  fickle  Bob  who  wins  her,  the  faith- 
ful John  who  wins  death. 

Under  the  Greenwood  Tree  just  faintly  suggests  an  ironic 
condition.  Dick  wonders  at  the  prosaicness  of  his  father  and 
mother,  and  reflects  that  all  the  fathers  and  mothers  he  knows 
have  the  same  unromantic  kind  of  love;  yet  in  marrying 
Fancy,  who  has  more  than  the  usual  girlish  taste  for  "fixings" 


54 

and  the  little  refinements  of  life,  and  who  has  once  been  faith- 
less to  him  because  of  this  liking,  he  runs  a  risk  of  as  great 
a  prosaicness  and  perhaps  a  less  contented  one,  as  any  father 
and  mother  in  Mellstock.  Paula,  the  Laodicean,  learns  to 
separate  the  gold  from  the  tinsel,  and  truly  respects  and  honors 
Somerset,  yet  she  can  wish  he  were  a  De  Stancy  with  all  the 
romantic  interest  that  attaches  to  that  old  family,  which  she 
sees  decaying  and  passing  away  as  all  things  must  pass  away. 

The  other  novels  do  not  leave  us  with  any  sense  of  a 
world  ruled  as  we  would  like  to  have  it  ruled.  Tess  and  Jude 
are  among  the  hardest  books  to  read,  and  to  reread  them  calls 
for  a  genuine  act  of  courage.  They  create  in  us  the  feeling 
which  life  often  gives  us,  that  we  must  interfere  to  set  things 
right ;  that  surely  we  would  not  muddle  them,  as  they  are  now 
muddled.  The  Woodlanders  and  The  Return  of  the  Native 
are  those  worst  of  tragedies,  the  tragedies  of  mistakes,  of  little 
deficiencies  of  firmness  or  of  foresight  that  bring  such  dis- 
proportionate effects.  Two  on  a  Tower  and  A  Pair  of  Blue 
Eyes  are  of  the  same  nature,  but  less  convincingly  effective. 
The  Hand  of  Ethelberta  and  The  Well  Beloved,  which  are 
designedly  lighter  in  tone,  leave  their  tang  of  bitterness.  Cir- 
cumstances far  too  often  force  the  Ethelbertas  to  desert  their 
better  selves,  and  the  vagueness  and  whimsicality  of  their 
deires  far  too  often  keep  the  Pierstons  from  genuine  happi- 
ness. Far  from  the  Madding  Crowd  vibrates  between  the 
idyllic  charms  of  sheep  shearing  and  agricultural  suppers,  and 
the  irony  of  hopeless  passions  like  that  of  Boldwood  and  the 
quiet  sufferings  of  Gabriel  Oak. 

There  is  another  phase  of  the  general  irony  of  life  which 
interests  Hardy.  It  is  the  rather  dark  psychological  problems 
which  often  fascinated  Hawthorne.  Among  the  Wessex 
Poems,  there  is  one  called  "The  Dance  at  the  Phoenix,"  in 
which  an  old  woman,  who  has  long  been  a  virtuous  wife,  is 
so  mastered  by  an  irresistible  impulse  that  she  slips  away  from 
her  sleeping  husband  and  returns  to  the  giddy  habits  of  her 
youth.  There  is  a  story  in  A  Group  of  Noble  Dames  which 
also  illustrates  the  fact  that  we  none  of  us  know  what  is  in 
us.  Like  Barbara  of  the  House  of  Grebe,  we  believe  that  our 
love  is  divine,  and  that  no  physical  misfortune,  no  moral  delin- 


55 

quency  could  make  us  cease  from  loving  those  we  now  hold 
dear.  Yet  it  takes  only  a  moment's  thought  about  our  instinc- 
tive repugnance  to  all  that  is  abnormal  and  deformed,  to  con- 
vince us  that,  confronted  with  such  a  mutilation,  we,  like  Bar- 
bara, might  find  our  boasted  love  was  only  human,  and  could 
but  shudder  and  turn  away.  "Squire  Patrick's  Lady"  and 
"An  Imaginative  Woman"  show  curious  psychological  prob- 
lems, but,  though  the  latter  well  reveals  the  tragedy  of  that 
utter  loneliness  and  lack  01  sympathy  which  can  drive  to  death 
two  sensitive  people,  who,  if  they  could  have  known  each 
other,  would  have  found  companionship  and  comfort,  they  do 
not  add  any  new  shade  to  the  sombre  picture  we  have  watched 
Hardy  paint.  fc-**  AA4*tef*4*n*>  <*■£  **k*  "&*** 

If  we  leave  a  general  consideration  of  the  novels  and  turn 
to  particular  events  and  scenes,  the  irony  of  life  is  clearly 
evident.  There  is  a  short  story  called  "The  Waiting  Sup- 
per" which  is  a  typical  illustration.  The  heroine  who  origin- 
ally married  the  wrong  man  is  on  the  eve  of  marriage  with 
the  right  one,  when  her  former  husband  who  has  not  been 
seen  for  some  years,  and  is  supposed  to  be  dead,  returns  to 
her.  He  merely  greets  her  and  promises  to  return  in  an  hour. 
She  waits  not  only  the  hour  and  the  night,  but  days  and  years ; 
afraid  to  marry  her  lover,  lest  this  unwelcome  husband  come 
again.  When  they  have  both  grown  so  old  and  staid  that  it  no 
longer  seems  worth  while  to  change  their  state  of  courtship 
for  the  state  of  marriage,  his  skeleton  is  found  at  the  foot 
of  a  dam,  where  it  has  lain  ever  since  the  night  he  interrupted 
their  union.  One  of  the  Wessex  Tales,  "Fellow  Townsmen," 
has  to  quote  its  author,  "that  curious  refinement  of  cruelty  in 
the  arrangement  of  events  which  often  proceeds  from  the 
bosom  of  the  whimsical  god  at  other  times  known  as  blind 
Circumstance."  The  hero  hears  of  the  death  of  an  unloved 
and  unsympathetic  wife,  just  one  half  hour  after  the  mar- 
riage of  a  girl  he  has  long  loved.  It  is  said  of  this  man  that 
his  eyes  had  a  curious  look,  best  described  by  the  word 
"bruised,"  "the  sorrow  that  looked  from  them  being  largely 
mixed  with  the  surprise  of  a  man  taken  unawares." 

There  is  a  certain  amount  of  significance  in  the  kind  of 
characters  Hardy  chooses.     He  is  not  fond  of  the  deliberately 


56 

wicked  man,  who  plans  to  do  evil.  Manston  in  Desperate 
Remedies  and  Dare  in  A  Laodicean  are  the  only  ones  of  this 
nature.  He  is  apt  to  introduce  the  voluptuous,  selfish  type 
of  man,  or  even  woman,  who  is  driven  by  his  instincts  rather 
than  by  his  reason;  and  invariably  creates  misery  without 
specially  desiring  or  planning  to  do  so.  Such  are  Wildeve  in 
The  Return  of  the  Native,  Sergeant  Troy  in  Far  from  the 
Madding  Crowd,  and  to  some  extent  Alec  D'Urberville  in 
Tess.  Neither  does  he  seem  fond  of  depicting  the  man  who 
is  struggling  with  himself.  In  a  measure  we  feel  Jude's  ef- 
forts to  get  the  better  of  his  many  vices,  and  in  the  tale  of 
"The  Distracted  Preacher,"  the  conflict  between  the  man's 
loyalty  to  his  religion  and  his  love  for  the  fair  smuggler  is 

I  rather  lightly  touched,  as  is  Knight's  conflict  in  A  Pair  of 
Blue  Eyes;  but  in  general  man  is  not  struggling  with  him- 
self, but  with  a  malignly  indifferent  power  outside  him.  We 
have  no  Markheims,  no  Dr.  Jekylls  and  Mr.  Hydes.  The 
typical  Hardy  hero  is  a  passive  man,  more  inclined  to  contem- 
plation than  to  action,  to  endurance  than  to  defiance.  The 
Mayor  of  Casterbridge  is  his  one  strenuous  character  in  our 
American  sense  of  the  word.  There  is  an  expression  in  com- 
mon speech  very  applicable  to  the  Mayor.  "He  brought  it 
on  himself."  \  Indeed  the  Mayor  cannot  shirk  the  responsi- 
bility of  his  pride  and  stubbornness,  can  not  place  the  blame 
on  a  cruel  providence.  But  there  is  an  irony  in  the  Mayor's 
life,  an  irony  with  a  truth  in  it  that  strikes  home,  as  do  all 
the  Hardy  ironies.  When  the  Mayor  does  learn  humility, 
when  he  does  see  his  folly,  his  energy  is  gone,  has  been  eaten 
up  by  these  very  mistakes.  He  knows  how  to  begin  a  new 
life,  but  he  has  neither  the  desire  nor  the  will.  The  "wisdom 
to  do"  comes  with  "departure  of  the  zest  for  doing." 

The  "insignificant"  tragedies  are,  then,  without  doubt, 
an  integral  part  of  the  work  of  Hardy.     The  question  arises 

)  whether  he  has  so  emphasized  this  side  of  existence  because 
he  is  always  seeing  it,  or  because  he  needs  to  see  it  in  the 
interests  of  artistic  productions.  He  has  himself  said  that 
"the  crash  of  broken  commandments  is  as  necessary  an  ac- 
companiment to  the  catastrophe  of  a  tragedy  as  the  noise  of 
drum  and  cymbals  to  a  triumphal  march,"  and  Maeterlinck 


57 

has  assured  us  that  the  * 'Angel  of  Sorrow  can  speak  every 
language — there  is  not  a  word  but  she  knows;  but  the  lips 
of  the  Angel  of  Happiness  are  sealed,  save  when  she  tells  of 
the  savage's  joys."  Furthermore,  Hardy  tells  us,  when  he 
writes  on  "Candour  in  English  Fiction"  in  the  Eclectic  Mag- 
azine for  March,  1890,  that  there  is  a  revival  of  interest  in 
great  dramatic  movements,  in  the  collision  between  the  indi- 
vidual and  the  general,  once  worked  out  by  the  dramatists  of 
the  Age  of  Pericles  and  those  of  the  Age  of  Elizabeth.  But, 
though  things  move  in  cycles,  they  are  not  true  cycles,  but 
what  Comte  happily  characterized  as  "a  looped  orbit."  We 
do  not  have  revolution,  but  evolution,  and  the  collision  of 
to-day  between  the  general  and  the  individual  demands  new 
and  original  treatment.  The  original  treatment  which  he 
mentions  is  a  disclosure  of  those  laws  which  are  merely 
social  expedients  and  have  no  basis  in  the  heart  of  things ;  and 
the  showing  of  the  triumph  of  the  commonplace  majority 
over  the  exceptional  few.  Such  a  statement  of  present-day 
needs  in  art  may  easily  be  stretched  so  as  to  cover  all  that  is 
sombre  in  his  own  work,  but  it  by  no  means  proves  that  there 
is  any  divorce  between  his  artistic  instincts  and  his  philoso- 
phy of  life.  Rather  it  shows  that  he  mentions  as  artistic  sub- 
jects, the  very  problems  of  the  day  which  he  considers  most 
pressing.  As  for  the  feeling  of  the  futility  of  all  things,  which 
he  does  not  mention  as  an  artistic  possibilty,  that  is  too  much 
a  part  of  the  poems,  of  the  novels,  and  of  the  chorus  of  The 
Dynasts,  and  is  too  frankly  stated  in  various  magazine  articles 
to  be  merely  an  artistic  atmosphere.  It  must  be  part  of  the 
man's  philosophy  of  life. 

Closely  connected  with  this  question  of  how  much  gloom 
is  to  be  regarded  as  an  artistic  scheme,  is  the  kindred  one  of 
how  far  these  little  accidents,  like  the  losing  of  letters  and  the 
delay  of  news,  are  to  be  regarded  as  true  ironies  of  fate,  how 
far  as  necessary  devices  of  the  drama  or  novel.  There  are 
dramas  into  which  the  element  of  extraneous  chance  does  not 
enter,  where  naked  soul  is  brought  into  contact  with  naked 
soul,  openly  and  directly,  and  the  conflict  lies  in  the  clash  of 
forces  bared.  Such  is  Antigone,  such  is  Monna  Vanna.  But 
if  you  imagine  yourself  constructing  a  drama  or  a  dramatic 


I 


58 

novel,  how  could  you  do  it  unless  you  made  some  use  of  such 
devices  as  the  dropping  of  letters,  overhearing  of  conver- 
sations, and  chance  encounters?  Situations  must  be  made 
dramatic,  they  must  convey  to  the  spectator  or  reader  the 
conditions  that  are  in  the  minds  or  natures  of  the  actors,  and 
as  they  are  sufficiently  true  to  the  experience  of  every  one, 
the  extraneous  chances  are  legitimate.  To  be  sure  there  is 
the  finest  art  in  selecting  those  circumstances  which  carry 
conviction.  When  as  in  Eden  Phillpott's  Secret  Woman,  the 
dashing  rain  interrupts  a  tense  and  powerful  scene  and  drowns 
the  one  sentence  which  would  have  saved  the  whole  tragedy, 
the  mind  of  the  reader  revolts.  The  circumstance  is  too  ab- 
normal. There  are  deaths  also  that  are  too  opportune.  We 
feel  that  the  hero  dies  because  he  troubles  his  creator. 

If,  then,  some  extraneous  chances  are,  though  not  abso- 
lutely necessary,  a  highly  valuable  part  of  dramatic  construc- 
tion, what  ones  and  how  many  should  be  so  considered  ?  The 
answer  seems  to  be,  all  those  that  are  inevitable,  all  those  that 
are  of  the  nature  that  if  this  hadn't  happened,  something 
else  would,  to  bring  about  the  result  or  the  catastrophe.  As 
we  shall  see,  this  will  by  no  means  cover  the  ironical  chances 
of  the  Hardy  stories.  The  "brute  chances"  which  are  in- 
evitable are  those  which  come  because  the  characters  have  put 
themselves  in  a  position  where  something  must  happen. 
Othello  often  seems  a  drama  of  pure  accidents  that  are  brought 
about  by  the  wicked  scheming  of  Iago ;  and  Desdemona  seems 
a  mere  victim  caught  in  his  evil  machinations.  But  Desdemona 
has  put  herself  in  a  position  where  there  is  every  possibility  that 
something  will  befall  her.  She  has  married  a  man  of  different 
race,  age,  religion,  and  traditions;  married  him  because  of  a 
romantic  attachment.  There  is  always  the  bare  possibility 
that  she  might  find  life  a  smooth  sailing,  but  the  chances  are, 
as  we  say,  that  she  will  not,  and  that  Iago  but  brought  to  a 
i  focus  what  sooner  or  later  must  have  come.  So  in  The  Re- 
J  turn  of  the  Native,  Mrs.  Yeobright  is  turned  away  from  the 
door  of  her  son,  because  Eustacia,  his  wife,  thinks  he  hears 
her  knocking,  and  he  does  not.  It  is  the  discovery  later,  that 
she  has  been  there,  and  has  not  succeeded  in  gaining  admit- 
tance, which  brings  about  the  rupture  between  Clym  and  Eus- 


59 

tacia,  a  rupture  that  from  the  first  was  inevitable,  when  one 
thinks  of  the  difference  between  them,  that  what  was  valuable 
to  her  in  the  shape  of  gayety  and  social  position  and  adven- 
ture, was  as  dust  and  ashes  to  him,  with  his  desires  of  im- 
provement for  his  fellowmen.  It  is  too  old  and  common  a 
situation  to  leave  us  in  any  doubt  of  the  issue.  Eustacia  car- 
ried within  her  the  seeds  of  discord,  and  had  it  not  come 
through  the  turning  away  of  Mrs.  Yeobright,  it  would  have 
come  in  some  other  fashion. 

So  much  for  what  is  inevitable.  In  this  book  the  inevit- 
able and  the  utterly  extraneous  stand  side  by  side.  On  the 
night  when  Eustacia  has  decided  to  flee  with  Wildeve,  Gym's 
letter  ought  to  have  been  brought  to  her ;  but  first  it  is  forgotten 
by  the  bearer,  then,  when  it  is  delivered,  her  grandfather 
thinks  she  is  asleep  and  does  not  give  it  to  her.  Had  she  re- 
ceived it,  she  might  have  gone  back  to  Clym,  and  perhaps  they 
would  have  wrought  out  a  mutual  forbearance.  Such  are  the 
"brute  chances"  that  are  not  inevitable.  They  are  our  con- 
stant regrets.  They  are  the  little,  trifling  things  that,  had 
they  been  different,  might  have  changed  the  whole  course  of 
jour  lives.- 

In  Two  on  a  Tower,  again,  some  accident  must  come.  A 
young  idealist  of  twenty-two  who  knows  nothing  of  the  world 
is  bound  to  tire  of  a  woman  twelve  years  his  senior.  But  the 
accident  that  does  come  is  not  inevitable.  They  are  married, 
and  then  they  find  that  through  a  technical  flaw,  their  mar- 
riage is  illegal.  In  a  generous  impulse,  the  woman  refuses  to 
remarry,  and  sends  her  lover  away  to  study,  not  even  allow- 
ing herself  to  have  the  address,  lest  she  be  tempted  to  write 
to  him  and  thus  interfere  with  his  career.  And  all  her  later 
troubles  and  her  tragedy  come  upon  her  because  she  has  not 
this  address.  In  Tess,  this  species  of  accident  is  not  at  all 
inevitable.  We  feel  them  as  part  of  the  forces  that  are  ar- 
rayed against  her,  and  give  her  no  chance;  and  perhaps  the 
most  agonizing  point  in  the  book  is  when  Tess,  who  is  resist- 
ing Alec  D'Urberville  with  all  her  strength,  doubting  her 
own  powers  of  endurance,  writes  that  letter  of  heart-broken 
appeal  to  Angel  Clare,  and  we  know  that  it  is  lying  in  his 
father's  parsonage,  as  the  net  closes  round  her. 


6o 

The  ironic  circumstance  which  is  simply  ironic  and  not  in- 
evitably connected  with  the  situation  is  very  common  in  the 
Hardy  novels.  The  case  of  houses  which  are  held  on  lives, 
and  have  the  possibility  of  renewal,  which  is  discovered  too 
late,  is  a  favorite  one.  It  forms  part  of  the  plot  of  Desperate 
Remedies,  and  in  The  Woodlanders,  Giles  discovers  just 
twenty-four  hours  after  the  death  of  the  last  holder  that  he 
could  have  added  more  lives  and  renewed  his  holding.  The 
result  turns  him  from  a  rich  man  to  a  poor  one  and  causes 
him  to  lose  Grace.  In  a  short  story,  "Netty  Sargent's  Copy- 
hold," in  Life's  Little  Ironies,  the  heroine  who  has  lost  her 
property  by  an  hour,  gets  the  better  of  chance,  by  cleverly 
bolstering  her  uncle  in  a  chair,  and  making  the  dead  fingers 
sign  the  name,  while  the  witness  who  is  looking  in  at  the 
window,  never  dreams  of  the  forgery. 

Of  all  the  stories  that  show  this  irony  of  the  "brute 
chance,"  none  so  well  and  pithily  expresses  it  as  that  one  in 
Life's  Little  Ironies,  called  "The  Winters  and  the  Palmleys." 
A  man  enters  a  house  at  night  to  find  his  own  love  letters, 
which  he  does  not  want  his  scornful  mistress,  who  has  cast 
him  off,  to  show  to  her  new  lover.  The  box  he  seizes  hap- 
pens to  contain  money  as  well  as  the  letters ;  he  is  arrested  for 
stealing,  tried  and  hanged.  This  is  only  exceeded  by  Guy 
de  Maupassant's  "La  Ficelle,"  in  which  the  mere  stooping  to 
pick  up  a  piece  of  string  in  obedience  to  a  thrifty  habit  he  had, 
involves  a  man  in  an  arrest  for  a  lost  purse;  and  then,  later, 
when  the  neighbors  will  not  believe  his  protestations  of  inno- 
cence, even  after  the  purse  has  been  found,  his  trouble  drives 
him  to  illness  and-  death.  One  may  say  that  these  accidents 
were  greatly  helped  by  people;  that  in  the  first  case  the  boy's 
death  was  due  to  the  unkindness  of  his  former  sweetheart  in 
not  telling  that  he  came  merely  for  the  letters,  and  in  the 
second,  the  man's  tragedy  was  caused  by  the  lack  of  charity 
of  the  neighbors,  too  prone  to  believe  the  worst.  All  this  is 
true,  but  it  does  not  alter  the  primal  fact  that  the  men  suf- 
fered for  what  they  in  no  wise  merited,  and  that  a  trivial 
accident  called  down  upon  them  as  heavy  a  curse  as  the 
wicked  acts  themselves  could  have  done. 

In  Hardy,  then,  "brute  chance"  runs  riot.     If  we  took 


6i 

from  him  the  undelivered  letters,  the  marriage  licenses  that 
have  a  mistake  in  date  or  place,  the  leases  where  chance  of 
renewal  is  discovered  after  the  time  has  expired,  the  mar- 
riages that  come  too  early  or  too  late,  we  should  spoil  the 
whole  fair  fabric  of  his  tales.  There  is  a  reason  why  we  have 
no  right  to  take  these  accidents  away.  They  are  sufficiently 
true  to  life  to  be  legitimate.  For  we  are  all  familiar  with 
these  accidents.  We  receive  every  trivial  letter  that  is  ever 
sent  to  us,  one  day  we  fail^o  get  an  important  one  and  an  ir- 
revocable misunderstanding  is  the  result.  There  are  two  peo- 
ple whom  we  have  sedulously  kept  apart  for  years;  on  the 
day  that  one  calls,  the  other  is  sure  to  drop  in  for  dinner.  In 
more  trivial  affairs  we  recognize  the  impishness  that  lurks  in 
inanimate  things.  It  is  when  we  are  hurrying  to  catch  a  train 
that  our  shoe  lacer  breaks  or  the  laundry  fails  to  bring  back 
our  clean  collars,  when  we  can  least  spare  our  watch  that  the 
main  spring  snaps.  We  realize,  too,  how  often  we  say  "JusV 
my  luck,"  when  we  have  hastened  to  see  a  man  and  find  he  left 
an  hour  earlier  that  day,  or  are  impelled  to  take  a  train  which 
is  then  delayed.  These  are  the  kinds  of  circumstances  which 
Hardy  intensifies  and  emphasizes. 

What  we  are  apt  to  forget  in  a  persistent  reading  of  his 
work  is  that  "brute  chance"  is  not  always  adverse,  though 
perhaps  it  needs  some  other  descriptive  adjective  when  it  is 
favorable.  We  just  as  frequently  realize  that  things  happened 
in  the  nick  of  time,  that  there  was  good  fortune  in  the  taking 
of  a  certain  train,  that  some  kind  power  warned  us  to  make  a 
visit  or  write  a  letter  which  later  events  proved  to  be  a  happy 
inspiration,  as  we  call  attention  to  our  ill-luck.  /The  fortu- 
nate chances,  the  saving  encounters  are  never  the  theme  of 
Hardy.  This  sense  of  unfairness  is  what  makes  the  optimis- 
tic people  whom  he  troubles,  eager  to  have  his  admirers  admit 
that  he  is  one-sided.  And  they  must  admit  it  squarely,  though 
over-emphatic  is  a  better  word  than  one-sided  since  no  one 
is  called  upon  to  give  us  all  sides  of  life.  But  it  is  a  genuine 
and  grave  fault  to  over-represent  one  side  of  life,  because  that  . 
is  to  make  it  untrue  to  life  as  a  whole.  In  admitting  this 
fault,  however,  his  admirers  do  not  forget  the  virtue  that 
causes  the   fault,  that  he  has  had  the  supreme  courage  to 


62 

grapple  with  this  "brute  chance"  of  which  we  are  all  more 
or  less  afraid,  and  to  lay  bare  its  bruteness.  For  what  rea- 
son, say  the  easy-going  optimists,  life  is  sad  enough  in  itself, 
when  we  read  books,  let  us  have  something  to  make  us  hap- 
pier and  to  help  us.  And  they  do  not  realize  that  they  have 
delivered  themselves  bound  to  the  enemy,  that  they  have  ad- 
mitted that  life  is  as  intrinsically  sad  as  the  pessimist  finds 
it,  and  the  only  difference  is  that  he  cares  to  look  at  what  they 
would  cover.  Still  there  remains  the  plea  for  reading  only 
what  will  help  us  and  give  us  courage  to  go  on.  But  there  are 
helps  to  be  found  in  the  world's  dark  places,  as  well  as  in  its 
bright  ones.  Moreover,  if  it  come  to  a  question  between 
truth  and  the  most  helpful  illusion ;  let  us,  the  pessimist  would 
contend,  take  the  truth  though  it  be  of  ink-deep  blackness, 
and  the  illusion  be  bursting  and  shining  with  light. 

There  remains  one  question.  Is  there  never  any  explana- 
tion of  these  occurrences  which  seem  whims  of  destiny? 
Maeterlinck  in  his  book  Wisdom  and  Destiny  has  made  a  dis- 
tinction between  inner  and  outer  destiny  which  is  a  vital  one. 
It  is  a  point  unrecognized  or  unemphasized  by  both  Schopen- 
hauer and  Hardy.  If  our  aim  in  life  is  happiness,  and  if  by 
happiness  we  mean  the  avoidance  of  pain,  then  we  are  not  likely 
to  attain  it,  and  will  surely  find  the  world  a  place  of  misery  and 
suffering.  But  how  if  our  aim  is  not  happiness  but  growth,  how 
if  we  are  courageous  enough  to  say  that  we  do  not  care  what 
comes  to  us  or  to  our  friends,  for  that  is  the  harder,  what  pain, 
what  tragedy,  so  long  as  we  may  be  sure  that  we  are  all  advanc- 
ing and  expanding?  This  it  is  which  makes  Maeterlinck  say 
that  it  matters  not  at  all  what  comes  to  you,  but  it  matters  su- 
premely how  you  take  it.  There  are  over-conscientious  people 
who  take  life  as  a  discipline  and  study  every  event  to  see  why  it 
was  sent  to  them  and  what  lesson  they  must  learn  from  it.  To 
these,  the  remark  of  Bernard  Shaw  is  applicable,  that  the 
world  is  no  one  person's  moral  gymnasium.  Better  than  this 
self-centered  reasoning  is  the  attitude  of  the  Mayor  of  Caster- 
bridge,  "I  am  to  suffer,  I  perceive!  So  much  scourging  as 
this,  then,  is  it  for  me?"  But  there  is  more  than  a  shade  of 
difference  between  these  extremes  and  the  attitude  of  Maeter- 
linck, since,  then,  this  has  come,  I  will  bear  it  like  a  man  and 
I  can  get  something  out  of  it. 


63 

In  general,  Hardy  recognizes  this  truth  that  it  is  better 
to  deal  with  true  things  than  with  illusions,  even  if  the  latter 
are  happier,  and  he  apparently  feels  that  he  is  dealing  with  the 
true  side.  In  one  particular  case,  that  of  Tess,  he  does  recog- 
nize the  value  of  inner  experience.  She,  he  confesses,  had 
a  mental  harvest.  There  are  three  possibilities  in  the  life  of 
Tess — to  have  married  an  Angel  Clare,  before  she  met  Alec, 
when  her  splendid  possibilities  might  have  borne  glorious  fruit, 
and  we  could  have  had  n6  story,  because  it  would  have  been 
one  of  Maeterlinck's  "fireside  dramas,"  for  which  there  are 
no  adequate  words;  to  have  had  the  life  she  did  have  and 
reaped  some  sort  of  a  mental  harvest;  or  to  have  married,  as 
would  naturally  happen,  some  stolid  countryman  and  reaped 
no  harvest.  The  first  would  undoubtedly  have  been  the  best, 
but  surely  the  last  is  the  worst,  even  though  it  involves  no 
sin  against  society,  and  no  actual  pain.  But  Hardy  does  not 
seem  to  feel  that  intensity  of  feeling,  richness  of  experience 
balance  the  extremities  of  pain  by  which  that  experience  is 
won.  Or  perhaps  he  thinks  the  intensity  and  richness  could 
come  as  well  in  happy  fashion.  There  is  no  reason  why  they 
could  not,  they  simply  do  not.  Most  of  us  have  to  be  jogged 
into  our  depths. 

When  Maeterlinck  says  that  dramas  between  sages  are 
unheard  of,  and  those  that  center  about  the  sage  are  rare,  and 
result  always  in  victory  for  the  sage,  he  means  not  that  trag- 
edies do  not  come  to  the  sage,  but  that  in  his  wisdom  he  draws 
the  sting  from  the  tragedy.  It  is  like  Browning's  poem, 
"Instans  Tyrannus" ;  you  can  have  no  tyrant,  unless  you  have 
the  slave  who  acknowledges  oppression.  Did  not  Clym  Yeo- 
bright  win  something  precious  out  of  his  mistakes  and  suffer- 
ings ?  Was  not  the  Bathsheba  Troy  whom  Gabriel  Oak  won  a 
richer  woman  that  the  Bathsheba  Everdene  he  wanted?  Did 
Giles  Winterborne  die  quite  in  vain  when  he  could  inspire  the 
love  of  a  Marty  South?  Was  not  her  life  ever  the  richer 
though  she  had  never  a  word  of  encouragement?  Think  of 
the  depth  of  the  love  that  could  say,  "But  I — whenever  I  get 
up  I'll  think  of  'ee,  and  whenever  I  lie  down  I'll  think  of  'ee. 
Whenever  I  plant  the  young  larches  I'll  think  that  none  can 
plant  as  you  planted;  and  whenever  I  split  a  gad,  and  when- 


64 

«ver  I  turn  the  cider-wring,  I'll  say  none  could  do  it  like  you. 
If  ever  I  forget  your  name,  let  me  forget  home  and  heaven! 
But  no,  no,  my  love,  I  never  can  forget  'ee;  for  you  was  a 
good  man,  and  did  good  things."  There  is  a  terrible  double 
irony  in  this  when  we  think  that  this  girl  who  could  be  so 
faithful,  never  had  one  word  or  smile  of  love  from  Giles,  and 
that  the  woman  for  whom  he  gave  his  life  in  love,  had  left 
Marty  alone  to  mourn  him.  But  is  there  not  also  a  rich  recom- 
pense in  the  possession  of  a  love  that  can  be  faithful  unto  death, 
or  that  can  lay  down  its  life  for  the  loved  one  ?  Let  us  acquire 
our  depths  of  experience  quietly  and  easily  if  we  can,  but 
let  us  acquire  them  at  any  price. 

Does  this  cover  the  whole  situation?  No,  for  there  are 
the  Eustacia  Vyes,  the  Farmer  Boldwoods,  the  Mayors  of 
Casterbridge,  who  win  no  wisdom  from  their  experience.  They 
have  the  elements  of  tragedy  in  them.  Just  as  there  are  some 
situations  in  which  we  feel  tragedy  to  be  inevitable,  so  there 
are  some  characters  that  have  the  seeds  of  an  evil  fate  in 
them.  As  Maeterlinck  has  well  said,  "If  Judas  go  forth  to- 
night, it  is  towards  Judas  his  step  will  tend,  nor  will  chance 
of  betrayal  be  lacking ;  but  let  Socrates  open  his  door,  he  shall 
find  Socrates  asleep  on  the  threshold  before  him,  and  there 
will  be  occasion  for  Wisdom."  That  is  his  reason  for  saying 
ithat  a  character  like  Louis  XVI  of  France  is  not  the  mere 
puppet  of  an  evil  destiny,  but  a  man  who  attracts  a  bad  destiny 
to  him.  And  even  Emily  Bronte,  whom  he  has  greatly  praised 
because  she  so  ennobled  a  meagre  destiny  by  the  richness  she 
put  into  it,  is  responsible  for  that  meagreness  since  she  lacked 
the  daring  that  would  have  brought  her  a  more  varied  exist- 
ence. So  we  feel  that  in  no  world,  no  matter  how  purposive, 
no  matter  how  kind  the  circumstances,  how  happy  their  lot 
in  life,  could  Eustacia  and  the  Mayor  have  been  true  children 
•of  wisdom.  Eustacia  was  born  a  rebel  and  died  a  rebel ;  the 
Mayor  rose  and  fell  with  a  stubborn,  bitter  pride.  There  are 
people  for  whom  we  can  not  honestly  predict  anything  but 
sorrow  and  turmoil;  and  for  whom  we  cannot  see  any  rest 
except  in  death.  They  seem  born  to  a  doom,  but  they  are 
iborn  to  it  because  they  will  not  understand  what  is  understand- 
ble.  Here  it  is  not  the  universal  which  is  blind  and  purpose- 
less, it  is  the  individual  who  is  blind. 


65 

There  are  cases,  however,  to  which  Maeterlinck's  explan- 
ation will  not  apply.  In  The  Return  of  the  Native,  Far  from 
the  Madding  Crowd,  Trumpet  Major  and  the  W oodlanders 
we  have  four  stories  of  patient  men  who  gave  all  possible 
tenderness  and  constancy  to  a  woman  and  were  long  unre- 
warded. There  is  a  measure  of  irony  in  the  fact  that  not 
one  of  them  won  the  girl  he  wanted  in  her  freshness  and 
bloom,  but  aside  from  this  one  point  in  common,  the  destinies 
meted  out  to  them  were  very  different.  Both  Giles  Winter- 
borne  of  The  W oodlanders,  and  John,  the  Trumpet  Major, 
failed  utterly  to  win  the  women  they  desired,  but  to  each 
was  given  a  heroic  part.  Giles  could  die  for  Grace's  good 
name,  John  could  sacrifice  himself  to  his  brother.  Both  had 
their  inner  reward,  for  to  love  deeply  and  truly  and  to  the 
point  to  which  they  loved  is  as  rich  and  varied  an  experience 
as  to  be  loved,  and  to  live  in  plain,  material  happiness.  Gab- 
riel Oak,  as  we  have  seen,  secured  perhaps  a  better  Bathsheba, 
so  his  fate  can  be  justified ;  but  what  can  be  said  of  Tamosin 
and  Diggory  Venn  in  The  Return  of  the  Native?  They 
marry  and  are  apparently  happy  ever  after,  but  why  did  they 
need  to  wait  so  long  ?  Tamosin  Wildeve  is  no  better  a  woman 
than  Tamosin  Yeobright,  only  a  sadder  one.  Perhaps  no 
blame  attaches  to  fate,  but  rather  to  Mrs.  Yeobright  and  to 
Tamosin's  submissiveness,  but  this  is  just  one  of  those  things 
that  are  hardest  to  bear.  Tragedy  is  not  irretrievably  bound 
up  in  Tamosin's  character  as  it  was  in  Eustacia's.  It  was  not 
inevitable  that  she  should  suffer ;  it  was  a  mere  blunder.  Surely 
our  blunders  do  not  need  to  be  scourged  so  heavily  as  our 
faults.  It  seems  that  after  we  have  allowed  for  all  the  ad- 
vantages of  wisdom  and  increased  experience,  there  remains  a 
residue  of  cases  for  which  we  can  find  no  justification. 

One  of  the  things  in  daily  life  that  has  always  seemed  to 
me  tragic  in  the  deepest  sense  of  the  word,  that  is  in  the 
Schopenhauerian  sense  of  being  non-understandable,  baffling, 
is  that  to  the  individual  comes  always  the  temptation  he  is 
least  able  to  resist.  If  your  will  is  weak,  if  decisions  are  hard 
for  you,  be  sure  that  nothing  but  decisions  will  come  your 
way.  No  explanation  of  an  inner  destiny  or  an  inner  tri- 
umph satisfies  us  here.     This  is  among  the  residue  of  things 


66 

unexplained  that  the  optimist  must  leave.  It  may  be  that  we 
must  regard  our  moral  body  as  we  do  our  physical  one,  and 
constantly  practise  exercises  to  strengthen  our  weakest  part, 
but  then  the  exercises  should  be  graded,  whereas  now  the 
heaviest  weight  seems  often  presented  first.  Of  course  it  may 
be  true,  as  Maeterlinck  suggests,  that  we  have  more  control 
over  outside  forces  than  is  now  apparent,  and  secretly  attract 
events  to  us,  but  then  why  should  we  not  secretly  attract  some 
guardian  angel  that  will  help  us  to  win  our  way  ?  Why  should 
we  attract  only  what  makes  us  sink  lower?  This  is  what  is 
really  terrible  about  a  book  like  Tess.  She  was  responsible 
for  her  own  downfall,  she  had  that  "slight  incautiousness  of 
character,"  inherited  from  her  race,  and  that  too  great  sub- 
missiveness  which  kept  her  from  pleading  her  own  cause,  and 
winning  Angel  Clare  back,  after  her  disclosure  had  driven 
him  from  her.  It  is  pitiful  to  think  that  these  traits  should 
wreck  her.  There  are  such  splendid  possibilities  in  Tess. 
What  could  she  not  have  been  under  a  happier  fate,  when  she  is 
so  fine,  and  wins  so  much  under  the  hard  one  meted  out  to 
her?     "Thou  hast  rushed  forward  to  the  utmost  verge  of 

/daring,  and  against  that  throne  where  Justice  sits  on  high 
thou  hast  fallen,  my  daughter,  with  a  grievous  fall,"  says  the 
Chorus  to  Antigone.  Schopenhauer  and  Hardy  have  gone  to 
the  utmost  verge  of  daring  and  have  brought  back  the  message 
.  that  Justice,  is  blind,  or  far  removed  from  her  blind  servants. 
We  hope  and  believe  that  this  is  not  the  final  answer,  we  must 
admit  they  have  a  right  to  it. 

This  brings  us  to  the  point  of  vicarious  pain.  William 
Watson  has  said  of  Tess,  that  it  is  a  direct  arraignment  of 
the  morality  of  vicarious  pain.  Vicarious  suffering  is  so  es- 
sential a  part  of  life  that  no  intelligent  person  will  question  it. 
What  men  like  Schopenhauer  and  Hardy  do  resent  is  not 
u-  suffering  for  the  sake  of  another,  but  suffering  for  the  sake 
of  suffering.  There  have  been  times  when  men  saw  much 
virtue  in  suffering,  when  they  felt  themselves  purified  and 
bettered  by  it;  and  there  are  still  people  who  welcome  it  in 
this  spirit.  As  we  have  seen,  there  is  just  an  atom  of  justi- 
fication for  their  view,  because  we  are  more  often  stirred  to 
our  depths  by  sorrow  than  by  joy.    But  the  atom  of  truth  will 


6/ 

not  save  the  day,  for  the  very  greatest  joys  can  go  so  much 
deeper  than  the  greatest  sorrows,  that  pain  is  not  absolutely 
necessary  for  depth.  Suffering  as  such,  then,  has  no  value, 
and  it  is  the  sense  of  suffering,  when  no  one  profits  that  so 
wrings  the  heart  of  Hardy. 

Another  problem  from  the  residue  of  the  unexplained  is 
the  fact  that  inner  growth  is  often  so  lop-sided.  Here  in 
America  we  are  very  familiar  with  a  struggle  that  has  become 
one  of  our  national  ideals, /'that  of  the  self-made  man,  of  the 
lesser  Abraham  Lincolns  and  James  A.  Garfields.  There  is 
always  much  to  be  respected  and  admired  in  these  displays  of 
pluck  and  bravery  and  courage,  but  there  is  usually  something 
to  be  deplored,  a  something  which  the  man  who  has  won  often 
recognizes  himself,  that  he  has  not  been  able  both  to  be  and 
to  become.  People  can  not  seem  to  win  two  things  in  life. 
The  ripeness  that  comes  from  leisure,  and  the  energy  that 
comes  from  resistance  to  heavy  odds  appear  to  be  always  op- 
posed. If  the  day  ever  comes  when  wealth  is  more  evenly  dis- 
tributed, perhaps  these  tragedies  will  lessen,  for  they  seem  not 
absolutely  unavoidable.  In  the  meantime,  one  wonders  why  so 
simple  a  desire  as  that  for  moral  and  inner  growth  is  not  more 
easily  gratified,  why  the  people  who  have  "souls  to  •invite,"  so 
seldom  have  time  to  invite  them.  This,  three  times  intensified,  is 
the  tragedy  of  Jude.  Everything  is  against  him,  nothing  en- 
courages him  in  his  struggle  to  carry  out  his  noble  intentions 
and  aspirations.  About  Clym  Yeobright,  who  has  the  same 
noble  ideals  of  helping  the  less  fortunately  endowed,  we  feel 
that  though  he  is  maimed  and  crippled  by  his  experiences, 
though  he  will  never  reach  what  he  should  have  reached,  yet 
he  has  some  compensation.  The  portion  of  Jude  is  utter  de- 
feat, "I  felt  I  could  do  one  thing  if  I  had  the  opportunity,  I 
could  accumulate  ideas  and  impart  them  to  others."  And  the 
opportunity  was  denied  him. 

The  result  of  the  usual  view  of  tragedy  >  which  takes  as 
its  basis  that  the  world  is  purposive, is  triumph.  However 
many  may  be  the  deaths  and  agonies  we  are  called  on  to  en- 
dure, however  our  feelings  of  sympathy  and  pity  and  horror 
may  be  wrought  up  and  stirred,  we  close  the  book  with  the 
sense  that  there  is  a  right,  and  that  the  right  triumphs.  Some- 
where a  flag  is  waving. 


68 

In  the  Schopenhauerian  view  of  tragedy  and  in  the 
Hardy  exemplification  of  it,  no  flags  wave.  We  may  feel  in- 
deed that  there  is  a  right,  but  it  does  not  always  triumph.  We 
have  often  the  irony  of  a  right  that  is  defeated.  With 
Schopenhauer  this  tragicness  in  life  results  in  renunciation. 
Accept  the  inevitable;  that  nothing  is  worth  living  for;  that 
all  is  not  only  vanity,  but  can  be  nothing  else.  Then  give  up 
this  illusion  of  happiness,  renounce  the  world  and  its  ways, 
and  so  find  peace.  In  Hardy  we  have  not  renunciation,  but 
resignation.  Accept  the  inevitable,  what  is  to  be,  will  be,  and 
as  they  say  in  Under  the  Greenwood  Tree,  "  'Tis  to  be  and 
here  goes  will  carry  a  body  through  it  all  from  wedding  to 
churching,  if  you  only  let  it  out  with  spirit  enough."  Life  is 
so  made,  and  must  be  so  endured.  If  you  realize  this,  if  you 
expect  nothing  better,  if  like  Elizabeth  Jane  you  know  its  in- 
trinsic nature  is  tragedy  and  not  comedy,  then  your  expecta- 
tions will  be  less  and  your  disillusion  easier. 

Few  more  words  are  needed  to  show  that  both  Schopen- 
hauer and  Hardy  are  alike  in  regarding  the  manifestation  of 
a  purposeless  world  as  tragedy  of  an  insignificant,  petty  and 
hopeless  nature.  From  the  idea  that  will  is  the  ground  of 
everything,  and  that  will  in  itself  lacks  harmony,  life  is  seen 
to  be  inharmonious  and  therefore  tragic.  A  dramatic  por- 
trayal of  this  lack  of  harmony  will  teach  the  actors  that  there 
is  no  prize  in  life  worth  the  pain  of  existence,  and  that  renun- 
ciation of  life  is  best.  This  is  the  Schopenhauerian  statement  of 
tragedy.  Hardy  gives  us  stories  that  are  illustrations  of  this 
view.  People  are  not  happy,  but  we  do  not  feel  that  there  is 
any  satisfactory  reason  why  they  should  not  be  happy.  Life 
is  simply  against  happiness.  A  little  mistake,  like  the  joke  of 
sending  a  valentine  to  a  man,  may  bring  down  as  heavy  a 
doom  as  a  premeditated  murder.  Error  and  chance  rule  the 
world,  not  justice.  So  we  get  characters  who  are  not  aggres- 
sive nor  strenuous,  who  seldom  take  the  initiative,  who  do 
not  demand  much,  who  do  not  challenge  life,  who  scarcely 
aim  at  all,  much  less  at  the  stars ;  but  who  are  quiet,  restful, 
kindly,  humorous,  and  above  all  capable  of  endurance. 
Placed,  against  their  will,  in  a  world  not  to  their  liking,  they 
are  resigned  to  it  and  will  make  the  best  of  it. 


CHAPTER  IV. 
Outcome  of  Purposelessness. 

The  man  on  the  street  who  consents  to  talk  to  you  about 
a  purposeless  world  has  always  one  retort,  "What's  the  use  of 
trying,  then  ?"  "If  I  am  not  to  be  rewarded  for  my  good  deeds, 
nor  punished  for  my  bad  ones,  either  here  or  hereafter,  why 
should  I  care  what  I  do,  why  not  yield  to  every  impulse,  good 
or  bad?"  If  he  is  of  a  more  thoughtful  turn  of  mind  he  will 
tell  you  not  to  talk  about  such  an  idea.  "We  must  believe  that 
in  some  fashion  things  are  good  or  the  world  would  not  go 
on;  there  would  be  no  ambition,  no  enjoyment.  We  would 
all  lie  down  and  die,  the  quicker  the  better.' '  To  some  of  them 
the  notion  is  so  repugnant  that  they  declare  no  one  could  hon- 
estly hold  it.  Those  who  do  must  believe  in  something  good, 
even  when  they  say  they  do  not;  they  must  believe  even 
though  their  belief  is  unknown  to  themselves. 

What  men  believe  unknown  to  themselves  we  must  omit 
from  our  consideration,  and  we  must,  in  common  respect, 
grant  that  our  pessimists  are  not  telling  us  of  idle  theories 
but  of  deepest  convictions.  In  truth,  the  view  of  the  man  on 
the  street  is  shallow  and  neglects  two  important  considera- 
tions. The  first  is  that  life  is  largely  a  matter  of  habit.  By 
the  time  the  pessimist  comes  to  his  opinion  about  the  futility 
of  life,  he  is  usually  so  involved  in  these  futilities  of  duties, 
affections,  and  pleasures  that  he  cannot  break  away  from 
them,  even  when  he  sees  their  vanity.  He  does  not  necessar- 
ily become  the  man  with  the  long  face  and  gloomy  sentence. 
Indeed,  there  are  many  optimists  who  show  more  gloom  over 
their  individual  woes  than  the  pessimist  does  over  the  entire 
gloom  of  the  world.  For  the  pessimist  the  sun  still  shines, 
trees  are  still  green,  friends  are  still  worthy  of  cultivation, 
and  mankind  an  object  to  arouse  compassion  and  service. 

This  brings  us  to  the  second  point  about  the  pessimist 
which  the  man  of  the  street  forgets- — his  great  courage.  All 
pessimists  must  have  courage;  for,  to  look  upon  this  dark 

(69) 


70 

side  of  life  is  as  deep  and  heartrending  an  experience  as  one 
can  imagine.  "Pessimism"  says  Royce,  borrowing  a  word  of 
Hegel's,  "isn't  the  doctrine  of  the  merely  peevish  man,  but  of 
the  man  who  has  once  feared  not  for  this  moment  or  for  that 
in  his  life,  but  who  has  feared  with  all  his  riature;  so  that  he 
has  trembled  through  and  through,  and  all  that  was  most 
fixed  in  him  has  become  shaken."  A  man  of  no  courage  will 
either  refuse  to  fear  in  this  fashion,  or  the  fear  will  drive  him 
to  voluntary  death.  But  the  man  of  courage  will  look  and 
turn  away  to  lead  the  most  brave  and  upright  life.  Sometimes 
it  seems  as  if  the  courage  of  a  pessimist  were  the  only  cour- 
age deserving  the  name.  It  is  easy  enough  to  be  brave  when 
you  think  things  are  good  on  the  whole,  and  your  suffering 
is  but  for  a  day;  but  to  be  brave  when  you  have  no  hope  of 
anything  better  takes  a  strong  soul.  The  philosopher,  Scipio, 
in  Owen  Wister's  Virginian  says  that  the  courage  of  your 
convictions  isn't  half  enough  courage.  "There's  times  in  life 
when  a  man  has  got  to  have  courage  without  convictions — 
without  them — or  he  is  no  good." 

This  courage  without  convictions  is  the  practical  out- 
come of  purposelessness,  and  it  lends  to  the  work  i  of  the  pes- 
simist when  he  chances  to  be  a  writer,  a  tonic  quality. !  Can 
any  one  read  that  little  book  of  pessimistic  verses,  A  Shrop- 
shire Lad,  without  feeling  braver  ?  Isn't  it  one  cry  of  cour- 
age all  the  way  through?  Its  verses  are  sad  and  gloomy 
enough,  they  hold  out  no  hope  except  the  rest  of  death,  they 
breathe  the  unquiet  life  of  man,  and  the  injustice  of  the  things 
he  encounters  as  strongly  as  do  the  W  ess  ex  Poems  or  the 
Poems  of  Past  and  Present,  but  they  ring  with  a  call  to 
arms. 

"Therefore,   though   the  best   is  bad 
Stand  and  do  the  best  my  lad." 

and  never  shame  the  Shropshire  land  that  gave  you  birth.  It 
is  this  same  quality  of  courage,  of  a  humanity  that  refuses  to 
be  dwarfed  into  sluggishness  by  destiny,  which  makes  one 
critic  call  Hardy  a  "heroic  optimist,"  and  class  him  with  Ibsen, 
Zola,  Tolstoi;  and  which  makes  another  biographer  say  of 
him  that  his  satire  and  bitter  irony  are  not  dispiriting  in  the 


7i 

sense  in  which  cynicism  is  dispiriting,  for,  as  he  depicts  it, 
"life  is  not  little,  nor  cheap,  nor  easily  found  out." 

The  theoretical  outcome  of  purposelessness  fs  also  a  mat- 
ter of  courage,  the  courage  involved  in  facing  truth.  There 
is  a  passage  in  William  James'  Will  to  Believe  in  which  he 
says  that  the  questions,  "What  do  you  think  of  yourself  ?" 
"What  do  you  think  of  the  world?"  are  questions  that  all 
must  deal  with  as  seems  good  to  them.  If  we  decide  to  leave 
the  riddle  unanswered,  it  js  a  choice;  if  we  waver  in  our  an- 
swer, that  is  a  choice  and  whatever  we  do  we  take  a  leap  in 
the  dark.  The  pessimist  is  the  one  who  cannot  leave  the 
question  unanswered,  cannot  waver,  but  must  take  the  leap  in 
the  dark.  Two  characteristics  mark  the  pessimist.  One,  the 
fact  that  extreme  sensitiveness  can  often  drive  a  man  to  cyn- 
icism or  pessimism  is  best  expressed  by  a  poetical  phrase  of  . 
Nietzsche,  "I  love  the  great  despisers  because  they  are  the 
great  adorers,  they  are  arrows  of  longing  for  the  other 
shore."  The  other  is  best  formulated  by  Professor  Royce, 
"It  is  the  way  of  men  who  demand  ultimate  answers,  and  JL- 
who,  if  they  can't  get  them,  prefer  doubt,  even  if  doubt  means 
despair."  An  arrow  of  longing  for  an  ultimate  answer!  ■ 
What  can  such  a  man  bring  for  an  answer  to  the  riddle  ? 

The  final  outcome  of  a  purposeless  view  of  life  is  no 
more  than  the  final  outcome  of  a  purposive  one,  a  single  theory 
which  all  pessimists  can  accept,  but  an  unevasive  statement 
of  the  truth  as  they  see  it,  and  a  tentative  solution.  Naturally 
these  solutions  will  differ.  Indeed  we  have  seen  Royce  stat- 
ing the  problem  of  evil  as  clearly  as  ever  Schopenhauer  gave 
it,  yet  arriving  at  an  optimistic  conclusion.  It  behooves  us 
now  to  see  what  tentative  conclusions  Schopenhauer  and 
Hardy  reached,  and  whether  these  are  similar. 

I  do  not  know  that  the  solution  of  Schopenhauer  can 
be  called  a  tentative  one;  at  least  it  is  not  tentatively  offered, 
if  it  must  be  so  accepted.  He  regarded  the  path  of  asceticism 
as  the  only  absolutely  final  outcome  of  a  purposeless  view  of 
the  world.  The  idea  of  renunciation  is  no  new  one  either  in 
eastern  or  western  religion,  but  I  think  it  usually  has  more  of 
the  purpose  of  purification  in  it,  of  a  freeing  of  some  power 
which  is  impeded  by  the  grossness  of  matter,  than  of  the 


\ 


72 

purpose  of  release  from  the  capricious  nature  of  pain.  Schop- 
enhauer of  course  could  not  counsel  the  freeing  of  anything, 
since  he  saw  nothing  to  free.  This  restless,  capricious  longing 
is  the  heart  of  all  willing,  and  when  the  individual,  has  freed 
himself  from  this  unrest,  nothing  is  left.  As  he  says  at  the 
close  of  the  fourth  book  of  Die  Welt  als  Wille  und  Vorstel- 
lung,  if  you  still  have  the  nature  of  will,  you  will  consider  this 
final  annulment  of  the  will,  nothing;  but  if  you  have  learned 
to  penetrate  this  nature  of  the  will,  and  have  once  seen  to  the 
full  its  wholly  irrational  character,  then  you  will  regard 
this  world  and  all  the  worlds  of  your  desires  as  nothing. 

Professor  Royce  has  an  illuminating  suggestion  about 
Schopenhauer.  He  says  that  the  path  from  mediaeval  mysti- 
cism to  a  system  of  pessimism  is  a  very  short  one.  Both  lay 
infinite  emphasis  on  the  vanity  and  unsatisfactoriness  of  the 
world,  both  advise  the  forsaking  of  such  illusory  delights; 
but  where  the  one  finds  recompense  in  a  contemplation  of  the 
divine  perfection,  the  other  finds  no  compensation  and  at  the 
most  can  only  hope  for  release.  The  contemplation  of  the 
mystic  is  vague  and  ecstatic  and  dream-like,  he  is  bound  to 
have  waking  moments  when  the  vision  is  faint.  It  is  these 
waking  moments  which  the  pessimist  seizes  and  emphasizes. 
Mr.  Royce  quotes  Bunyan's  saying  at  the  end  of  his  Pilgrim's 
Progress — "I  saw  in  my  dream  that  there  was  a  way  to  the 
bottomless  pit  from  the  very  gate  of  Heaven,  as  well  as  from 
the  City  of  Destruction"  and  adds,  "Now,  Schopenhauer's 
mission  it  was  to  explore  this  highly  interesting  way  with  con- 
siderable speculative  skill."  So  our  Thomas  a  Kempis  whom 
we  unhesitatingly  accept  in  the  most  orthodox  circles,  and 
our  Schopenhauer  whom  we  cast  out  as  a  heretic,  ought  to  be 
of  the  same  value  in  showing  us  this  true  picture  of  life,  that 
it  is  essentially  restless,  craving,  finitely  tragic,  and  that  it 
never  can  be  anything  else.  And  the  criticism  one  could  bring 
against  such  a  mysticism  as  that  of  Thomas  a  Kempis  is  the 
same  that  one  could  bring  against  the  pessimism  of  Schopen- 
hauer that  in  their  asceticism  both  provide  us  with  a  somewhat 
colorless,  bloodless  substitute  for  living.  They  give  us  no 
fighting  formulas,  and  yet  the  world  presents  itself  to  us  as 
a  place  of  battle. 


73 

This  is  the  plain  man's  revolt  from  the  Schopenhauerian 
outcome  of  purposelessness.  The  philosopher's  dissatisfac- 
tion is  of  another  nature.  To  him  the  really  interesting  ques- 
tion is  whether  purposiveness  is  a  matter  of  choice  or  a  matter 
•of  discovery;  whether  the  nature  of  our  consciousness  de- 
mands that  we  put  purpose  in  the  world,  as  Kant  has  shown 
it  to  demand  that  we  put  law  there ;  or  whether  we  know  it  to 
be  there  or  not  to  be  there  from  the  facts  of  our  experience. 
Schopenhauer's  value  l&s  rather  in  his  insight  into  a  real 
problem  of  life,  than  in  anything  he  has  contributed  to  this 
genuine  philosophical  side  of  the  problem.  This  kind  of  a  dis- 
cussion of  purposelessness  need  not  concern  us  here,  and  is 
only  mentioned  because  of  its  prophetic  interest.  If  that  phil- 
osopher should  ever  arise  who  could  show  in  satisfactory  man- 
ner what  many  have  dimly  felt,  that  purposiveness  is  a  part  of 
the  nature  of  our  consciousness,  then  some  synthesis  of  pessi- 
mism and  optimism  would  seem  not  impossible,  till  then  we 
are  like  to  have  both. 

The  ultimate  value  of  Schopenhauer  for  the  general 
reader,  then,  will  lie  in  no  solution  he  has  offered  but  in  the 
Jboldness  and  frankness  of  his  statement  of  what  every  one 
must  realize,  either  dimly  or  clearly,  as  a  real  side  of  life. 
We  do  not  either  as  philosopher  or  plain  individual  need 
to  accept  his  doctrine  that  the  "will  to  live"  is  everything.  We. 
are  not  obliged  to  say  that  the  only  road  to  happiness,  if  happi- 
ness it  can  be  called,  lies  through  the  path  of  annihilation.  But\  if 
in  these  days  of  evolutionary  doctrine  and  science,  we  cannot 
deny  the  seeming  cruelty  of  the  struggle  for  existence; 
these  days  of  introspection  we  cannot  deny  the  incessant  alter- 
nation of  restlessness  and  insipidity.  The  day  has  gone  by 
when  we  could  simply  assert  there  was  purposiveness,  or  lose 
ourselves  in  a  mystic  admiration  of  it.  We  must  have  what 
might  be  called  a  "working"  purpose;  that  is  one  that  will 
take  into  account  just  this  tragically  capricious  element  of 
purposelessness  in  life.  The  value  of  a  pessimism  such  as  that 
of  Schopenhauer,  then,  is  to  drive  those  who  cannot  accept  it 
to  a  higher  optimism. 

Schopenhauer  gave  a  very  complete  picture  of  the  ideal 
and  practice  of  renunciation.     It  was  to  be  a  giving  up  of 


I 


74 

everything  on  the  part  of  the  individual  and  must,  logically, 
result  in  race  suicide.  It  was,  however,  the  release  of  the  in- 
dividual that  interested  him.  Eduard  Von  Hartmann  fol- 
lowed the  idea  of  renunciation  further,  and  since  Hardy  is 
quoted  in  the  Real  Conversations  of  William  Archer  as  say- 
ing that  The  Philosophy  of  the  Unconscious  suggested  to 
him  what  seemed  almost  like  a  workable  theory  of  the  great 
problem  of  the  origin  of  evil,  it  is  not  out  of  place  to  consider 
him  here.  We  saw  in  reviewing  Schopenhauer  that  the  will 
which  exists  in  men  as  the  individual  will,  may  exist  in  ani- 
mals, in  the  bees  for  instance,  as  a  will  of  the  species,  and  in 
plant  or  lower  forms  of  life  in  a  still  more  vague,  general  and 
indefinable  way.  And  we  saw  that  man  becomes  conscious 
of  this  will  and  its  nature,  and  that  there  are  degrees  of  con- 
sciousness even  among  men.  Von  Hartmann  starts  at  this 
point.  lThe  fact  that  we  become  conscious  leads  him  to  be- 
lieve that  there  are  two  "Grunds"  instead  of  one  as  Schopen- 
hauer thought>  These  he  calls,  will  and  idea,  or  the  uncon- 
scious and  the  conscious.  We  can  not  will  without  willing 
something,  he  says,  and  this  something  is  the  idea.  The  ideas 
are  always  present,  but  they  are  in  the  process  of  changing 
their  nature ;  first  they  belong  to  the  realm  of  the  unconscious, 
then  to  that  of  the  conscious.  A  large  part  of  his  work  is 
devoted  to  a  proof  that  these  two,  the  conscious  and  the  un- 
conscious, exist  side  by  side.  Our  reflex  actions  of  which  we 
are  unaware,  the  traits  of  character  that  suddenly  come  to  the 
surface  to  our  very  great  surprise,  the  aim  of  nature  for  the 
propagation  of  the  species  disguised  under  the  name  of  love, 
are  a  few  of  the  many  examples  of  the  unconscious  which  he 
presents.  The  line  of  division  is  an  unstable  one.  At  present 
the  unconscious  is  the  stronger  factor,  but  it  is  daily  losing 
ground.  In  a  sense  the  unconscious  is  the  higher  element,  for 
it  is  always  quicker,  surer,  and  more  far-seeing  than  the  con- 
j   scious. 

One  is  reminded  here  of  Maeterlinck,  of  his  feeling  that 
the  future  is  within  us,  that  we  ought  to  be  able  to  penetrate 
the  veil  of  the  unconscious,  and  some  day  shall  be  able.  Both 
of  them  agree  that  the  conscious  is  our  goaT,  that  it  is  the 
higher  in  the  sense  of  being  that  toward  which  everything  is 


t 


75 

tending.  The  control  of  the  unconscious  by  the  conscious 
seems  to  be  the  final  aim.  To  Maeterlinck  this  idea  is  fraught 
with  hope,  to  Von  Hartmann  it  brings  only  despair.  Here 
he  is  very  like  Schopenhauer  in  recognizing  the  unsatisfac- 
tory nature  of  the  will,  and  in  realizing  that  as  we  grow  more 
conscious,  we  shall  only  be  more  aware  of  this  unsatisfactori- 
ness.  He  considers  the  possibility  of  happiness  in  this  world, 
in  some  dreamed  of  hereafter,  and  in  a  world  made  better  by 
the  evolution  of  some  better  species.  In  the  first  case  he  finds, 
like  Schopenhauer,  that  there  is  more  pain  than  pleasure  in  the 
world,  and  that  pain  is  active,  while  pleasure  is  only  the  nega- 
tive result  of  the  cessation  of  pain.  The  second  is  an  im- 
possible ideal.  We  can  only  think  of  two  possible  hereafters 
for  individuals,  one  where  there  shall  be  no  pain  and  no 
striving,  the  other  a  repetition  of  this  present  life.  Of  these 
the  first  is  too  suggestive  of  tediousness  and  insipidity,  the 
second  would  have  the  same  pains  that  afflict  us  now.  The 
third  theory  of  a  possible  better  finite  world  is  also  dismissed, 
because  nothing  could  change  the  nature  of  the  will,  and  that 
nature  means  suffering.  So  he,  too,  arrives  at  the  solution  of 
renunciation.  His  emphasis,  however,  is  not  on  the  enlight- 
ened individual  man  who  decides  not  to  live  and  stifles  the 
will,  but  on  some  future  time  when  the  race,  having  attained 
full  consciousness,  shall,  as  a  race,  decree  annihilation.  The 
race  is  to  struggle  to  acquire  consciousness  that  it  may  work 
out  its  own  redemption,  that  is,  its  cessation  from  pain,  by 
decreeing  its  own  annihilation. 

The  part  of  Von  Hartmann  that  interests  Hardy  is  not 
this  final  speculation,  but  the  thought  of  the  unconscious  be- 
coming conscious.  The  theory  that  The  Philosophy  of  the 
Unconscious  suggested  to  him  (he  says  it  is  not  Von  Hart- 
mann's  own  theory)  he  thus  expresses,  "There  may  be  a  con- 
sciousness, infinitely  far  off,  at  the  other  end  of  the  chain  of 
phenomena,  always  striving:  to  express  itself,  and  always 
baffled  and  blundering,  just  as  the  spirits  seem  to  be."  Mr. 
William  Archer  asks  "Is  not  that  simply  the  good  old  Man- 
ichaean  heresy,  with  Matter  playing  the  part  of  the  evil  prin- 
ciple— Satan,  Ahriman,  whatever  you  choose  to  call  it  ?"  And 
Mr.  Hardy  responds :  "John  Stuart  Mill  somewhere  expresses 


i 


76 

surprise  that  Manichaeanism  was  not  more  widely  accepted. 
But  is  not  all  popular  religion  in  essence  Manichaean?  Does 
not  it  always  postulate  a  struggle  between  a  principle  of  good 
and  an  independent,  if  not  equally  powerful  principle  of 
evil?" 

This,  then,  is  a  suggestion  of  one  outcome  of  Hardy's 
philosophy,  that  he  is  inclined  to  think  of  the  evil  and  good  in 
the  world  as  two  opposed  principles,  rather  than  as  one  sub- 
\^  ordinated  under  the  other.  There  are  said  to  be  three  prin- 
cipal ways  of  accounting  for  the  origin  of  evil.  One  is  the 
Manichaean  idea  of  dualism,  two  definite  powers,  one  good,  the 
other  evil :  another  is  that  of  Plato  and  Aristotle,  the  form  or 
spirit,  which  is  good,  is  resisted  by  an  a-moral  matter:  the 
third,  which  St.  Augustine  used  in  controverting  the  Mani- 
chaean heresy,  that  the  good  estranges  a  part  of  itself  as  evil, 
in  order  that  it  may  show  the  distinction  between  good  and  evil, 
and  that  by  contending  and  conquering  the  good  turns  the 
evil  into  a  higher  good.  Hardy's  suggestion  seems  to  in- 
clude the  two  first.  His  remark  that  the  consciousness  which 
tries  to  express  itself  is  baffled  and  blundering,  leads  us  to 
think  of  the  resisting  matter,  the  reference  to  John  Stuart  Mill 
X      shows  how  much  dualism  he  sees  in  the  world  about  him. 

In  a  chronological  reading  of  the  work  of  Thomas 
Hardy  one  often  feels  that  it  is  not  his  purpose  to  suggest  a 
solution,  that  he  is,  like  Ibsen,  concerned  in  stating  the  prob- 
lem, in  showing  the  bones  which  Life  has  bared  to  him,  and 
that  he  awaits  some  solver  of  the  riddle.  At  first  we  expect 
that  solver  to  be  an  enlightened  and  improved  man,  and  we 
go  looking  for  some  hint  of  Nietzsche's  "Superman."  Nietz- 
sche finds  the  same  trouble  with  the  First  Cause  that  Hardy 
does.  "A  God  who  is  omniscient  and  omnipotent,  and  who 
does  not  even  provide  that  His  intentions  be  understood  by 
His  creatures — could  that  be  a  God  of  Goodness?"  "Would 
He  not  be  a  cruel  God,  if  He  had  the  truth  and  yet  could 
quietly  look  down  upon  mankind,  miserably  worrying  itself 
for  the  sake  of  truth  ?"  "God  does  not  hear — and  even  if  He 
did,  He  would  not  know  how  to  help.  The  worst  is  that  He 
seems  incapable  of  communicating  himself  clearly."  Nietz- 
sche then  turns  utterly  away  from  God  and  finds  his  solution 


77 

in  man,  not  man  of  to-day  who  is  a  creature  of  false  ideals  and 
degradation,  but  man  who  is  to  come — "beyond-man,"  he 
calls  him.  The  will  is  to  be  its  own  liberator,  but  it  is  the 
"Will-to-Power,"  and  not  the  old  restless  "will-to-live"  of 
Schopenhauer.  This  will  has  an  aim,  the  aim  of  the  per- 
fected man.  There  is  not  in  Hardy,  so  far  as  I  have  been 
able  to  discover,  one  passage  that  can  be  interpreted  as  hint- 
ing at  a  solution  that  is  to  come  through  man,  either  in  the 
Nietzsche  sense  of  an  evolved  "Superman"  or  the  Maeter- 
linck sense  of  the  man  who  shall  have  more  knowledge  of  the 
secret  laws  of  nature  and  of  all  the  realm  of  the  unknown. 
All  that  there  is  in  him  of  this  nature  is  the  insistence  that  it 
is  better  to  know  the  worst.  "Who  holds  that  if  way  to  the 
Better  there  be,  it  exacts  a  full  look  at  the  Worst."  The 
change  that  he  is  going  to  find  satisfactory  must  be  more  fun- 
damental and  far-reaching  than  a  change  in  man,  it  must  be 
a  change  in  the  First  Cause  Itself.  And  this  brings  us  to  The 
Dynasts. 

The  Dynasts  is  a  summing  up  of  all  the  Hardy  philos- 
ophy. In  the  work  of  Hardy  in  general,  and  in  the  poems  in 
particular,  there  is  the  constant  recurrence  of  the  idea  that 
Nature  and  her  Creator  are  blind.  Poems  like  "By  the  Earth's 
Corpse,"  "The  Bedridden  Peasant,"  "God-Forgotten"  all 
have  the  cry  that  God  does  not  know  what  men  are  suffering. 
"The  Sleep-worker,"  "The  Lacking  Sense,"  "The  Mother 
Mourns"  all  tell  of  the  awakening  of  the  earth.  Thjsjin- 
consciousness  of  the  primal  force  is  the  theme  of  The  Dynasts. 
The  opening  speeches  give  us  the  clue.  The  Shade  of  Earth 
asks,  "What  of  the  Immanent  Will  and  Its  Designs?"  And 
the  Spirit  of  the  Years  responds, 

"It  works  unconsciously,  as  heretofore, 

Eternal  artistries  in  Circumstance, 
Whose  patterns,  wrought  by  rapt  aesthetic  rote, 
Seem  in  themselves  Its  single  listless  aim, 

And  not  their  consequence." 

The  Spirit  of  the  Years  is  then  asked  why  It  behaves  in  this 
way,  and  suggests  two  theories;  that  the  Immanent  Will  is 


7& 

tired  of  this  world  and  has  betaken  itself  to  others,  and  that 
this  planet  lost  Its  care  by  the  acts  of  bad  men  early  in  its 
history.  It  is  suggested  that  some  shock  may  wake  this  sleep- 
ing Will ;  but  the  Spirit  of  the  Years  finds  nothing  in  the  past 
on  which  to  build  such  a  hope. 

Once  the  Spirit  of  the  Years  is  asked  why  this  world 
should  exist  and  it  replies  that  it  is  as  good  as  any,  and  when 
the  second  question  is  naturally  put,  "Why  any?"  it  cannot 
answer.  Only  the  Immanent  Will  can  answer  that,  the  Spirit 
has  merely  been  rendered  conscious  by  chance  and  must  wit- 
ness Its  working.  Once  the  Chorus  tries  to  find  some  aim 
of  the  Will,  but  it  only  finds  words  Schopenhauer  might  have 
used,  "to  alter  evermore  things  from  what  they  were  before." 
•  Thus  there  is  a  double  unconsciousness.  The  Will  is  un- 
conscious of  Its  workings,  men  know  Its  workings,  but  are 
unconscious  of  Its  aims.  In  these  conditions,  men,  who  are  the 
puppets  of  the  Will,  can  adore  It  or  defy  It.  The  Pities  are  the 
ones  who  adore.  In  the  After  Scene  of  the  third  volume  of 
The  Dynasts  which  takes  place  in  the  Overworld,  the  Semi- 
chorus  of  the  Pities  give  their  hymn  of  adoration.  They  praise 
the  power  and  the  might  of  the  Thee  to  whom  they  sing.  It 
must  be  good,  it  must  have  some  reason  for  sending  suffering. 
Anyway  they  will  hope  so,  and  will  continue  to  sing. 

"Exultant  adoration  give 
The  Alone,  through  Whom  all  living  live, 
The  Alone,  in  Whom  all  dying  die, 
Whose  means  the  End  shall  justify !" 

The  Spirit  of  the  Years  is  almost  charmed  out  of  its  long  phil- 
osophy into  the  past  when  it  too  could  give  thanks  and  let 
raptures  rule.  But  the  Semichorus  of  the  Years  continues 
the  aerial  singing  and  gives  the  opposite  picture  to  that  of  the 
Pities,  the  old  unanswered  question  of  why  there  should  be 
lack  of  reason,  why  there  should  be  lack  of  aim.  If  there  is 
to  be  no  answer,  if  Its  blindness  is  never  to  be  cured,  then  let 
those  whom  It  has  quickened  into  life,  find  a  swift  and  sure 
extinction.    Then  the  Chorus  speaks  the  final  word : 


79 

"But — a  stirring  thrills  the  air 
Like  to  sounds  of  joyance  there 
That  the  rages 
Of  the  ages 
Should  be  cancelled,  and  deliverance  offered  from 

the  darts  that  were 
Consciousness  the  Will  informing,  till  It  fashion  all 
things  fair!" 

The  time  when  the  First  Cause  shall  become  conscious  which, 
of  course,  may  include  a  development  of  the  consciousness  of 
man,  is  what  Hardy  awaits. 

The  frequent  use  of  the  words  conscious  and  unconscious 
throughout  The  Dynasts  causes  one  to  think  of  Von  Hartmann. 
Both  have  the  idea  of  development  from  an  unconscious  to  a 
conscious  state,  but  in  the  philosopher  this  consciousness  is 
to  be  consummated  in  the  race,  in  the  author  we  get  the  im- 
pression it  is  to  occur  outside  the  race  and  come  to  men  as  an 
effect  of  change,  rather  than  as  a  process  of  change.  There 
is  also  something  more  hopeful  about  the  latter,  some  feeling 
that  the  world's  woe  will  lessen  if  these  halcyon  days  should 
ever  come.  Though  he  intimates  that  men  are  no  longer  over- 
powered by  the  idea  that  the  race  shall  cease  to  be,  in  such  a 
poem  as  "I  Said  to  Love,"  there  is  nothing  in  Hardy's  work 
to  indicate  the  solution  of  annihilation.  The  suffering  and  ' 
the  turmoil  of  the  present  world,  the  aimless  recurrence  of  ( 
the  same  events  and  deeds,  the  futility  of  all  action,  which 
The  Dynasts  of  course  emphasizes  just  as  much  as  his  other 
work,  is  no  more  an  illustration  of  Von  Hartmann  than  of 
Schopenhauer.  Both  philosophers  have  made  much  of  the 
capricious  element  in  life. 

The  other  likeness  to  Von  Hartmann  in  this  drama,  that 
the  Unconscious  is  really  the  cause  of  great  historical  move- 
ments, and  the  men  who  carry  them  out  and  seem  to  plan 
them  are  but  Its  puppets,  brings  us  to  a  troublesome  question 
which  has  been  showing  its  head  in  all  the  novels,  and  can 
no  longer  be  shirked.  It  is  a  clear  statement  of  determinism,  ^^ 
and  as  such  removes  all  direct  responsibility  from  mankind. 
Yet  we  all  feel  that  without  freedom  not  only  is  no  morality 


8o 

possible,  but  no  interest  in  men.     Who  cares  to  watch  the 
most  clever  marionettes  dance?   Or  is  interested  in  the  strug- 
gles of  poor  creatures  who  absolutely  can  not  break  a  single 
one  of  the  ropes  that  bind  them  ?    The  answer  to  this  difficult 
question  seems  to  me  to  lie  in  no  examination  of  the  amount 
of  responsibility  that  his  characters  feel  for  what  ills  befall 
them,  nor  even  in  the  degree  of  repentance  and  remorse  they 
show,  nor  yet  in  their  own  proneness  to  fatalistic  conclu- 
sions, but  in  the  more  practical  test  of  whether  they  seem 
like  real  people.     Here  Hardy  has  inadvertently  given  us  a 
genuine  answer.     The  people  we  read  of  in  the  novels  and 
poems  are  the  people  we  might  meet  to-morrow.     They  have 
just  as  much  freedom  to  do  anything  as  we  have,  are  just  as 
subject  to  mechanical  accidents  and  chance  rebuffs  as  we  are. 
If  we  always  see  them  exposed  to  such  chances,  there  is  noth- 
ing in  the  occurrences  which  could  not  happen  to  us  or  to  the 
people  we  see  about  us.     But  in  The  Dynasts  we  have  a  set 
y£>f  puppets  who  are  wound  up,  and  who  are  so  little  like  real 
people  that  they  excite  in  us  no  interest.      We  are  listless 
and  lackadaisical  before  them.     Napoleon  as  the  pure  man  of 
lestiny  has  been  robbed  of  the  trait  which  makes  the  Napo- 
leon of  history  attractive.     "If  we  be  doomed  to  marry,  we 
marry,"  they  say  in  Under  the  Greenwood  Tree.    "That's  not 
the  case  with  some  folk.     There's  that  wife  of  mine.     It  was 
her  doom  not  to  be  nobody's  wife  at  all  in  the  wide  universe. 
But  she  made  up  her  mind  that  she  would  and  did  it  twice 
over.     Doom?     Doom  is  nothing  beside  an  elderly  woman — 
quite  a  chiel  in  her  hands."    We  want  the  Napoleon  who  can 
see  and  seize  the  chances  destiny  offers,  who  has  the  power  to 
make  doom  "a  chiel."     Determinism  as  we  meet  it  in  every 
day  life  is  a  deeply  fascinating  problem,  determinism  worked 
out  into  a  system  like  that  of  The  Dynasts  has  gone  beyond 
the  point  of  vital  interest. 

The  final  outcome  of  renunciation  in  Schopenhauer  was 
unsatisfactory;  so  too  is  the  outcome  of  a  consciousness  that 
is  to  be  of  Hardy.  The  first,  however,  repels  all  our  instincts, 
the  second  has  the  failing  of  the  mystics,  that  of  being  vague 
and  remote  and  only  valuable  as  a  vision  or  dream.  But 
the  real  dissatisfaction  with  a  Hardy  interpretation  of  life  as 


8i 

an  ultimate  interpretation  is  that  it  is  man-centered.  If  one 
regards  man  as  the  pivot  of  the  universe,  then  it  is  evident 
that  the  world  is  very  little  to  his  wants  and  needs.  But 
there  is  no  reason  why  he  should  be  so  regarded,  nor  why  the 
earth  should  be  treated  as  the  only  world.  Both  may  be 
parts  of  some  system,  some  whole.  Evolution  impresses  on 
all  of  us  the  idea  of  development,  and  after  a  time  we  ask  for 
what  we  are  developing,  since  development  in  itself  is  no  goal. 
We  cannot  answer  that  /question.  If  we  could,  we  might 
answer  Hardy's  other  question  of  why  we  develop  in  this  way 
of  pain  and  suffering.  To  say  that  no  future  justification  can 
recompense  us  for  the  pain  we  are  now  enduring,  seems  to 
make  man  unduly  important.  The  First  Cause  may  seem 
blind  to  us ;  it  might  not  be  so  if  we  had  the  vision  of  all  that 
It  is  doing.  Here  Schopenhauer  and  Von  Hartmann  are 
more  consistent ;  they  see  that,  in  the  nature  of  the  will,  which 
would  make  any  superman,  any  glorified  world,  unhappy. 

This  deficiency  applies  to  the  strictly  philosophical  Hardy, 
and  not  to  the  author ;  and  it  is  as  the  author  that  he  is  valu- 
able to  the  general  public;  because  it  is  as  the  author  that  he 
has  given  us  this  picture  of  the  irrational  and  capricious  side 
of  life.  Whatever  may  be  the  final  reason  why  any  world 
should  exist,  or  why  this  world  should;  we  are  interested  in 
it  as  it  does  exist,  and  in  the  impression  it  makes  on  man. 
Like  Schopenhauer,  his  real  value  lies  in  the  clear  presenta- 
tion of  a  side  of  life  that  is  true.  We  are  not  all  like  the  man 
in  The  Dynasts  who  had  to  believe  the  world  was  round 
because  the  singers  up  in  the  gallery  said  with  such  gusto 
every  Sunday,  "the  round  world  and  they  that  dwell  therein." 
All  the  gusto  in  the  world  cannot  take  away  the  truth  which 
these  men  have  presented,  that  there  is  an  inharmonious  ele- 
ment in  the  life  we  are  forced  to  live. 

A  friend  who  talked  with  me  about  the  existence  of  this 
inharmonious  element  which  Hardy  had  made  her  recognize, 
admitted  that  it  was  intellectually  convincing,  and  wondered 
what  would  be  left  in  life  if  you  took  it  too  much  to  heart. 
A  few  weeks  later  she  sent  me  the  following  recently  pub- 
lished poem  as  a  very  direct  answer  to  her  question  of  what 
the  author's  philosophy  left  in  the  way  of  desire  to  live.  It 
is  called  "Let  Me  Enjoy."    Song :  minor  key. 


f 


82 


"Let  me  enjoy  the  Earth  no  less 
Because  the  all-enacting  Might 
That  fashioned  forth  its  loveliness 
Had  other  aims  than  my  delight. 

II. 

"About  my  path  there  flits  a  Fair 

Who  throws  me  not  a  word  or  sign; 
I  will  find  charm  in  her  loth  air, 

And  laud  those  lips  not  meant  for  mine. 

III. 
"From  manuscripts  of  tender  song 

Inspired  by  scenes  and  souls  unknown, 
I'll  pour  out  raptures  that  belong 
To  others,  as  they  were  my  own. 

IV. 

"And  some  day  hence,  toward  Paradise 
And  all  its  blest — if  such  should  be — 

I  will  cast  glad,  afar-off  eyes, 

Though  it  contain  no  place  for  me." 

Enjoyment  and  courage  then,  Hardy  leaves,  and  the 
feeling  of  a  very  sweet  spirit  which  recognizes  that  we  are  all 
seekers. 

In  our  attempt  to  find  out  in  what  purposelessness  con- 
sisted, and  to  show  the  effect  of  a  purposeless  view  in  the 
shape  of  tragedy,  we  found  Hardy  an  excellent  illustration  of 
Schopenhauer.  Both  found  the  world  a  purposeless  place, 
because  an  irrational  place,  where  no  aim  was  discernible. 
Both  found  the  tragedy  of  life  to  consist  in  this  conflict  of 
man  with  a  capricious  unknown.  In  our  attempt  to  find  out 
the  final  outcome  of  such  a  purposeless  view  of  life,  we  find 
Hardy  no  longer  illustrating  Schopenhauer.  He  is  no  fol- 
lower of  the  path  of  renunciation.  But  we  find,  too,  that 
what  is  valuable  in  both  is  not  their  solutions,  but  their  pre- 
sentations of  the  problem.  No  one  has  better  recognized  this 
element  of  caprice  in  life  than  Schopenhauer,  no  one  has 
better  illustrated  it  than  Hardy. 


CHAPTER  V. 
Artistic  Value  of  Purposelessness. 

There  remains  one  more  outcome  of  purposelessness  to 
be  considered,  and  that  is  the  outcome  of  purposelessness  in 
art.  In  presenting  a  purposeless  view  of  life  is  the  author 
attacking  the  very  bones  and  sinews,  not  only  of  the  faith  and 
traditions  in  which  the  western  world  has  been  reared,  but  of 
its  ideals  of  art?  The  value  of  Schopenhauer  lay,  as  we  have 
seen,  in  his  giving  us  a  true  and  graphic  picture  of  a  very  real 
side  of  life,  in  making  us  feel  that  the  world  is  a  place  of  stern 
conflicts,  and  often  of  losing  ones.  We  have  tried  to  show 
that  the  work  of  Thomas  Hardy  is  an  admirable  illustration 
of  just  this  truth  which  Schopenhauer  shows,  that  there  is 
from  man's  point  of  view  a  large  degree  of  chance  and  caprice 
in  life,  that  we  do  meet  with  incompleteness,  lack  of  fulfil- 
ment, thwarted  ambitions,  inharmonious  circumstances.  If 
all  this  is  so,  if  Schopenhauer  had  insight  into  a  truth  which 
we  can  transcend  but  not  refute,  if  Hardy  had  the  same 
insight,  if  Schopenhauer  expressed  it  in  a  popular  philosoph- 
ical system,  and  Hardy  in  a  series  of  successful  novels,  why 
penetrate  any  deeper?  Why  ask  whether  the  portrayal  of  a 
purposeless  view  is  as  successful  as  that  of  a  purposive  one  ? 

For  the  reason  that  the  art  which  presents  a  purposeless  I  )^ 
view  of  life  is  to  the  English  mind  not  usual  and  seems 
deficient.  Its  very  likeness  to  life  is  a  point  against  it,  its 
inactive  characters  are  another  detriment,  its  absence  of  poetic 
justice  completes  the  ban.  The  opposites  of  these  qualities 
are,  it  is  true,  what  we  have  learned  to  expect  in  our  art,  they 
are  not  necessarily  the  things  we  must  find  there.  To  fully  L 
enjoy  a  man  like  Thomas  Hardy  or  Eden  Phillpotts  or  Guy 
de  Maupassant  requires  a  new  point  of  view  on  the  part  of 
the  reader,  just  as  much  as  Romanticism  once  did,  but  it 
does  not  require  a  violation  of  one's  artistic  sense. 

There  is  a  sound  saying,  that  books  should  be  truer  than 
life  itself,  which  I  have  always  taken  to  mean  that  some  ideal- 

(83) 


84 

ization  is  necessary  on  the  part  of  the  writer.  He  should  give 
.  I  us  what  life  ought  to  be  rather  than  what  it  is.  Daily  life 
has  not  an  eye  for  the  dramatic,  it  is  often  trivial,  discursive, 
it  hides  its  hero  under  a  mass  of  meaningless  commonplaces. 
It  is  the  business  of  the  author  to  free  the  hero,  to  brush 
away  the  debris  so  that  he  stands  out  clear  and  commanding. 
In  life  we  meet  a  man  twelve  times,  and  three  out  of  the 
twelve  may  reveal  to  us  significant  traits  about  him;  but 
occasionally  it  happens  that  we  meet  a  person  at  a  great  crisis, 
and  the  flood  gates  are  opened,  and  we  know  in  a  night  what 
ordinarily  it  would  take  us  years  to  learn.  The  writer  must 
always  take  men  at  their  revealing  crises,  even  if  the  crisis 
is  a  prosaic  every-day  affair;  he  must  make  us  know  in  one 
book,  what  we  would  be  years  in  learning  by  observation. 
Out  of  the  mass  of  raw  material  which  life  thrusts  upon  him, 
he  must  select  what  is  vital  to  the  hero,  and  to  that  act  in  the 
hero's  life  about  which  he  centers  his  story.  He  must  do 
more  than  take  a  photograph  which  is  true  to  life,  he  must 
\  paint  the  portrait  which  gives  hidden  possibilities.  He  must 
do  more  than  show  us  the  mere  individual,  he  must  give  us 
a  hint  of  the  Platonic  archetype.  And  it  is  just  here  that  one 
questions  the  purposeless  view  of  life  as  a  subject  for  art. 
Does  it  deal  too  much  with  what  life  is,  and  too  little  with 
what  it  ought  to  be?  Should  some  truths  be  excluded,  and 
are  these  among  them? 

There  is  a  remark  of  Tranter  Dewy  in  Under  the 
Greenwood  Tree  which  is  pertinent.  "My  sonnies,  all  true 
^  stories  have  a  coarseness  or  a  bad  moral,  depend  upon't.  If 
the  story-tellers  could  ha'  got  decency  and  good  morals  from 
true  stories,  who'd  ha'  troubled  to  invent  parables  ?"  All  great 
art  deals  with  truth,  and  it  would  seem  at  first  that  every 
art  might  deal  with  every  truth ;  but  a  moment's  thought  con- 
vinces us  of  the  soundness  of  the  Tranter's  statement.  We 
must  turn  to  the  parables  for  all  that  side  of  life  which 
^  expresses  our  aspirations,  our  longings,  our  dreams,  our  vi- 
sions of  perfection.  Poetry  and  music  which  are  much  helped 
by  sound,  painting  and  sculpture  and  architecture,  which  have 
the  aid  of  color  and  form,  can  express  those  things  at  which 
the  novel  can  only  hint,  or  at  the  most  suggest  by  giving  the 


85 

negative  or  reverse  side.  The  realm  of  the  novel  is  those 
truths  which  have  life  in  them,  and  will  arouse  our  interest ; 
one  might  say  all  those  which  have  earth  in  them.  Not 
all  truths  will  bear  transplanting.  If  we  want  to  visit  the 
New  Jerusalem  or  the  home  of  Ulalume,  it  is  better  to  ascend 
with  St.  John  or  go  down  with  Poe,  but  if  we  want  to  visit 
Vanity  Fair,  let  us  join  Thackeray.  If  we  want  the  strength 
of  wise  thoughts,  let  us  go  to  Marcus  Aurelius,  but  if  we 
want  to  see  a  man  struggling  and  falling  in  the  effort  to  find 
wisdom,  let  us  go  to  Lear. 

Now  it  is  just  this  large  mixture  of  earth  in  a  purposeless 
view  of  life  which  makes  it  a  fit  subject  for  a  novelist,  and  OfM(k 
even  in  his  best  poetry  Hardy  is  still  the  novelist.    The  depths 
of  life  are  for  the  novel,  the  heights  are  not;  it  can  go  to 
the  bottomless  pit,  it  can  not  ascend  to  the  Celestial  City.  s 
Doubtless  Hardy  could  have  pointed  the  way  to  the  heights 
as  well  as  to  the  depths  of  life.    His  temperament,  his  insight 
into  the  dark  side  has  made  him  emphasize  that.     In  doing    HT 
this  he  has  transgressed  accepted  traditions  of  art,  he  has 
violated  no  fundamental  principles. 

That  a  character  should  be  interesting  and  lifelike  is  an 
essential  of  art.  In  Thomas  Hardy  where  the  real  protagon- 
ist is  always  the  unknown,  men  and  women  lack  initiative. 
One  of  his  triumphs  is  to  have  created  characters  who  are 
neither  active  nor  aggressive  and  yet  are  not  meekly  submis- 
sive. They  endure  all  things,  are  tinged  with  fatalism,  re- 
signed to  the  worst,  but  they  will  never  cringe  before  their 
destiny.  They  have  the  strong  characteristic  of  fortitude. 
Elizabeth  Jane,  who  will  not  yield  to  the  blandishments  of 
prosperity,  Tess,  who  will  not  overrate  her  fault,  are  splendid 
examples  of  this  type  of  bravery.  In  the  hands  of  a  great  ar- 
tist then,  neither  the  insistence  on  the  dark  problems  of  life, 
nor  the  prevalence  of  passive  characters  is  truly  detrimental. 
There  remains  the  one  question  of  fitting  rewards  and  pun- 
ishments. 

Whatever  may  be  the  spirit  of  our  day,  bravado,  courage, 
the  desire  to  "see  things  as  they  are,"  or  merely  Nietzsche's 
"transmutation  of  all  values,"  it  is  certain  that  we  dare  to 
question  the  truth  and  the  value  of  poetic  justice.    This  is  the 


86 

more  daring  because  it  is  an  ideal  of  such  ancient  and  respect- 
able lineage.  Hebrew  precept,  Greek  tradition  and  a  pro- 
nounced instinct  of  man  all  speak  in  favor  of  an  allotment  of 
rewards  and  punishments  according  to  deserts.  This  is  a  de- 
mand for  moral  cause  and  effect.  It  presupposes  that  there 
shall  inevitably  be  a  chain  of  causes  as  definite  as  those  of 
the  mechanical  world.  It  forgets  that  in  the  moral  world 
there  is  always  the  factor  of  freedom.  To-day  we  remember 
this.  We  no  longer  slur  the  last  clause  in  the  Century  Dic- 
tionary, "not  usually  found  in  life."  And  we  ask  why  that 
which  is  not  usually  found  in  life  should  usually  be  found  in 
books  about  life. 

There  are  two  distinct  types  of  poetic  justice,  both  of 
which  are  found  in  literature.  In  Raphael's  Cartoon  the  by- 
standers look  with  horror  on  the  fallen  Ananias  who  has  paid 
the  penalty  of  his  perfidy.  His  justice  comes  from  without 
in  striking  and  fitting  fashion.  The  spectator  of  the  play  of 
Othello  is  denied  any  such  gratification  when  Iago,  a  man 
of  greater  perfidy,  is  not  thwarted  by  Providence.  Poetic 
justice  here  must  depend  on  some  recognition  that  there  is  a 
blackness  of  sin  and  a  whiteness  of  purity,  that  virtue  is  its 
own  reward  and  vice  its  own  punishment  are  more  than  copy- 
book maxims.  The  Ananias  type  of  judgment  seems  to-day 
crude  and  naive.  It  does  not  fit  in  with  our  ideas  of  the  im- 
portance of  experience  and  of  the  psychological  effect  of  sin 
upon  the  sinner,  and  of  a  God  within  man.  Just  as  tragedy  has 
gone  from  the  extensive  type  of  the  Greeks  to  the  intensive 
kind  of  Shakespeare  and  Browning,  so  poetic  justice  has 
passed  to  the  working  out  within  man  rather  than  on  a  plane 
without.  The  effect  on  the  witness  is  something  like  that  pro- 
duced by  a  Greek  temple  and  a  Gothic  cathedral  respectively. 
The  death  of  an  Ananias  asks  of  the  spectator  only  the  defin- 
ite emotions  of  pity  and  horror.  The  case  of  a  Desdemona  or 
a  Duchess  of  Malfi  calls  for  more.  The  witness  of  the  trag- 
edy must  create  his  own  justice.  His  own  experience,  and  his 
own  observation  of  life  must  suggest  to  him  the  inference  to 
be  made. 

With  a  man  like  Thomas  Hardy  we  come  to  the  cases 
not  where  we  are  forced  to  create  our  own  justice,  but  where 


87 

we  can  create  none,  if  we  would.  He  is  a  man  of  his  time,  a 
time  which  does  not  demand  of  its  writers  that  like  Milton 
they  "justify  the  ways  of  God  to  men,"  but  that  they  shall  re- 
veal them.  Yet  in  revealing  some  of  the  ways  of  God  to  men, 
he  is  often  said  to  have  removed  a  bulwark  of  tragedy. 

Tragedy  involves  four  elements.     The  first  and  the  only  i 
one  absolutely  essential  is  conflict.    But  as  a  conflict  can  only  1 
arise  when  some  one  starts  it,  the  aggressive  spirit  becomes  •* 
a  part  of  tragedy.    In  all  ^reat  tragedy,  there  is  a  feeling  that 
one  party  to  the  conflict  is  something  greater  than  the  indi-*" 
vidual  man.     It  may  be  collective  men  in  the  shape  of  con- 
vention or  morality,  or  it  may  be  the  gods,  or  mysterious 
supernatural  forces,  but  it  is  never  man  and  man.    Because  it 
does  touch  on  this  deeper  issue  of  man's  relation  to  what  is 
about  him,  some  sort  of  a  reconciliation  is  felt  to  be  necessary. 
The  spectator  feels  the  need  of  squaring  himself  with  these 
forces  greater  than  he  is.    He  must  find  his  own  feet  before  he 
can  take  up  the  burden  of  life  again.    Poetic  justice  is  one  way 
of  effecting  this  reconciliation;  it  is  not  necessarily  the  only 
way. 

In  every  day  speech  we  use  the  word  tragic  with  no  hint 
of  poetic  justice.  A  Messina  earthquake  or  a  terrible  railroad 
accident  is  tragic.  The  tragedy  lies  in  the  fact  that  it  was  un-  '; 
deserved  by  the  victims  and  cannot  be  explained.  It  reminds 
us  of  man's  situation  in  the  world,  that  he  is  always  virtually 
in  conflict  with  forces  greater  than  himself  and  can  at  any 
moment  be  worsted.  Hardy's  stories  emphasize  this  sense  of 
the  ready-at-any-moment  tragicness  of  life.  Like  the  tragic 
episode  they  give  the  feeling  of  a  conflict  in  which  man  is  ever 
contending  with  all  that  is  unknown  about  him,  and  this  un- 
known is  of  course  greater  and  more  powerful  than  man.  This 
is  the  tragicness  of  great  forests,  and  of  the  open  sea,  and  of 
terrible  storms,  and  of  primitive  man  in  the  midst  of  wild 
beasts  and  primeval  nature — the  insignificance  of  man  and 
an  unknown  that  can  be  terrible.  This  tragedy  would  lose 
its  value,  if  man  were  always  conquered.  But  he  often  wins. 
Every  medical  discovery,  every  mechanical  invention,  every 
new  use  of  electricity  is  a  point  in  his  favor.  He  is  a  con- 
queror too  in  Pascal's  sense  of  being  a  reed,  the  most  feeble  in 
nature,  but  a  reed  which  thinks. 


88 

The  courage  of  man  in  daring  to  contend  with  what  is 
so  powerful  or  even  to  live  in  the  face  of  his  own  insignificance 
is  what  furnishes  the  needed  reconciliation.  The  witness  of 
it  finds  himself  possessed  of  increased  respect  for  humanity 
and  belief  in  man.  The  admiration  the  world  has  always 
given  to  great  explorers  and  discoverers  becomes  the  due  of 
every  man,  since  all  are  voyagers  on  unknown  seas.  They 
are  hero  voyagers,  too,  for  in  the  face  of  their  own  insignifi- 
cance before  great  unknown  forces,  they  live  according  to  the 
best  within  them.  They  have  thus  accomplished  their  des- 
tiny whether  they  meet  with  success  or  failure.  If  it  is  failure 
and  catastrophe,  then  the  spectator  is  purged  not  of  pity  and 
terror,  but  of  cowardice  and  all  meanness  of  spirit. 

The  creation  of  this  type  of  tragedy  based  on  a  lack  of 
justice  tends  to  broaden  the  tragic  conception  by  taking  away 
what  is  cut  and  dried  about  it.  As  long  as  poetic  justice  must 
be  exemplified  we  know  what  is  going  to  happen,  we  are  only 
excited  about  how  it  shall  come  to  pass.  We  have  read  the 
last  chapter  before  we  begin  the  book.  But  once  the  possi- 
bility of  a  lack  of  poetic  justice  is  admitted,  the  written  trag- 
edy has  all  the  excitement  of  life.  We  can  not  know  the 
end  till  we  come  to  it.  To  produce  this  uncertainty  justice 
itself  must  be  presented  as  an  uncertain  element:  There  can 
be  all  the  characteristics  Schopenhauer  allowed  the  will,  ir- 
rationality, blindness,  capriciousness,  but  there  can  not  be 
malignancy.  If  the  unknown  forces  are  bad  then  a  cut  and 
dried  tragedy  is  established  of  a  nature  which  hopeful  man 
will  not  tolerate.  We  must  feel  that  destiny  is  careless  and  un- 
certain, not  that  it  is  deliberately  unjust. 

That  sense  of  mystery  which  always  comes  when  we  think 
at  all  about  the  destiny  of  man  forms  the  attractiveness  of 
this  idea  of  tragedy.  One  type  is  excluded,  that  of  Othello 
and  Lear,  where  the  catastrophe  is  brought  about  by  the 
machinations  of  a  thoroughly  evil  man.  As  long  as  man's  pre- 
meditated wickedness  alone  is  the  cause  of  the  suffering  there 
is  no  illustration  of  a  lack  of  justice.  Othello  and  Lear  are 
pessimistic  tragedies,  but  their  deepest  pessimism  to  a  genera- 
tion brought  up  on  the  brotherhood  of  man  is  in  their  presen- 
tation of  men  who  want  to  be  wicked  and  work  hard  to  accom- 
plish it.     They  strike  at  the  root  of  our  pride  in  man  which 


89 

forms  the  reconciliation  element  in  a  tragedy  exemplifying  a 
lack  of  justice.  A  genuine  field  for  this  form  of  tragedy  is 
where  the  catastrophe  is  brought  about  by  some  weakness  in 
the  victim.  Such  a  one  is  Tess.  First  the  sensuality  of  Alec 
D'Urberville,  later  the  priggishness  of  Angel  Clare  cause  the 
sorrows  of  Tessi  yet  they  are  not  responsible  in  the  sense  in 
which  Iago  and  Edmund  are  responsible,  for  they  do  not  con- 
sciously choose  to  do  wrong.  The  blame  is  shifted  from  them 
to  something  outside  of  tnem.*  The  more  of  this  feeling  of 
outside  responsibility  there  is,  the  better  an  example  of  a  lack 
of  poetic  justice  we  have.)  So  that  a  purely  objective  story 
like  Guy  de  Maupassant's  "La  Ficelle"  is  an  almost  perfect 
example  of  this  type  of  tragedy. 

To  get  used  to  this  new  conception  whose  tragicness  con-" 
sists  in  the  uncertainty  of  life,  of  tone's  happiness,  and  even  of 
one's  moral  character  will  not  be  accomplished  in  a  day  or  an 
hour,  perhaps  not  in  a  generation.  We  are  fed  too  full  of  the 
daring  hero  who  challenges  the  world.  That  the  world  should 
challenge  a  man  is  a  harder  thing  to  realize.  We  thrill  with 
the  youth  who  would  paint  the  sun  if  he  had  to  draw  the  sun 
down  to  dip  his  brush  in  it.  It  is  the  call  of  manhood,  of  all 
that  is  strong  and  virile  in  the  races  of  the  west.  The  other 
tragedy  is  perhaps  only  to  be  appreciated  by  an  adult  people. 
One  hopes  some  children  will  always  linger,  that  we  shall 
never  lose  the  youths  who  want  to  paint  the  sun,  and  the  dramas 
about  them.  But  growing  up  is  inevitable  and  to  the  man 
who  has  truly  grown  up  the  feeling  must  come  that  life  with 
all  its  compensation,  its  brilliance,  its  worth-whileness  lies  close 
to  the  tragic  chaos  of  what  is  uncertain  and  unknown.  Profes- 
sor Royce  says,  "To  see  where  the  worst  problems  of  life  lie 
is  a  very  black  experience.  And  yet,  so  much  does  human  rea- 
son love  insight,  that  I  have  never  met  a  man  who  was  alive 
to  these  deepest  problems,  and  who  still  repented  him  of  his 
insight." 

For  those  of  us  who  do  not  repent  us  of  our  insight  the 
day  is  not  far  distant  when  we  may  expect  what  a  recent  writer 
in  the  Atlantic  Monthly  describes  as  "another  sort  of  tragedy 
founded  upon  the  very  inscrutability  of  the  plotting  of  our 
lives."  Indeed  it  is  already  upon  us — for  have  we  not 
Thomas  Hardy? 


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